Its back was distorted by a huge growth, until Runs realized that it was not organic but instead a kind of flexible container not unlike the one slung over his own right shoulder. The legs were tightly bound, a practice which struck Runs as foolishly confining. Perhaps it had something to do with the nakedness of Shirazian skin. It might be ashamed to reveal itself.
Finally there was the typically impossible Shirazian footgear, which not only protected the bottoms of the feet but also completely enclosed them in stiff, unyielding material. It was as impractical a piece of design as could be imagined. They made Runs uncomfortable just to look at.
Both lawbreakers gaped at each other for a long moment before the native made a noise. It was astonishingly loud. Runs’s ears folded in response. As it spoke, its naked facial muscles jumped wildly, as out of control as the Shirazian libido.
“Wow! What are you?”
Runs-red-Talking had spent many days immersing himself in native language study, usually finishing at or near the top of his study group, but in the shock of the moment his knowledge deserted him. Unable to formulate a sensible response, he settled for familiarity. Reaching out and forward with his right hand, all fingers spread and extended, he penetrated the native’s Sama in the vicinity of its face.
He had completely forgotten that it was precisely that gesture which had resulted in the honored scout Burden carries-Far’s death at the hands of another native.
“What is your name?” Even as he mouthed the words he felt a chill, wondering if he would be understood or if his response would be dangerously misinterpreted.
In any event, the native did not respond in a hostile fashion. It did not appear to be armed. Taking a moment to reflect on its diminutive size, Runs decided it was either a juvenile or very young adult. Regardless, it reacted eagerly.
“Hey, you can talk!”
Somewhat to his surprise Runs found he could understand the words. They were no different from what he had encountered in his studies.
“Sort of,” he said, wishing the native would moderate its tone.
It looked at him slightly sideways. Perhaps one eye was more efficient than its companion, Runs thought. “You sound weird. Like a cat that’s trying to hum.”
The short native promptly emitted a series of rapid barking sounds, issued like its words at deafening volume. Runs winced as he tried to make sense of them. Remember! Why can’t I remember?
Then it came to him. The last sounds were not whole thought communication but rather amusement expressed aurally. Instead of indicating laughter normally, via gestures and expression and body language, the Shirazians employed highly individualized variants of the barking sound. Runs was pleased. If the native was amused, it could not be angry. He lowered his right ear to indicate that he understood.
“Hey, that’s neat!” How did they stand such loudness, Runs wondered? His ears throbbed as the native continued, pointing with a five-fingered hand. And how did they build anything with only ten fingers? “What else can you do with those?” He fingered one of his own pitiful organs of hearing.
Runs was at once excited and confused. Was the juvenile Shirazian so different from the adult form? This one was openly friendly.
Of course, creatures like that existed on Quozlene itself, as well as Mazna. Species whose grubs or larvae were quiescent when disturbed but whose adult form reacted violently to contact. And like the Shirazians, the adults also varied wildly in size and shape from one another. Diversity gave rise to competition, which implied eternal conflict.
Had he betrayed the colony to such beings? Yet if this one was truly a mere juvenile … He searched the terrain beyond. It appeared to be traveling alone.
That made no sense. Studies proved that Shirazian juveniles stayed close to their parents or in restricted areas. What was this one doing out here by itself?
Like himself, he thought with a start.
It had not been wandering aimlessly. He could see it was healthy and well-fed. Nor did it act lost. Though it was difficult to identify juvenile gender since the females were pouchless, he guessed from bearing and hip displacement that the one confronting him was a male.
It made no sense. There had to be adults in the vicinity. He had no wish to sample the mature form’s violent propensities. The longer he remained, the greater the chance the adults would put in an appearance and the more ingrained this encounter would become in the juvenile’s memory, though studies suggested their attention spans were brief. A few apparently had no memories whatsoever. Occasionally this trait carried over into the adult form. It seemed especially common among important Burrow leaders, who frequently appeared to act from instinct instead of rational thought.
As all this flashed through Runs’s mind, the juvenile reached out with unexpected speed and grasped the extended fingers in his own. The breach of courtesy stunned Runs. You never invaded another individual’s Sama below the chin line unless you planned to kill or couple. Logic insisted that this native intended neither.
“Hey,” it declared in its booming, painfully loud voice, “you’re warm. In fact you’re really hot. Have you got a fever or something?”
You could tell a lot from visual and aural broadcasts, but one thing you could not learn was body temperature. To Runs-red-Talking the native felt as one dead. Yet it was obviously healthy. Runs realized he’d just made an important if accidental discovery. No one had taken measurements of the single dead native specimen’s body temperature until it was too late. Here he stood, clutching one that was alive and well. He wondered if the adults felt equally frigid.
Not that heat was absent. It was simply feeble.
“Don’t look so afraid,” the juvenile was saying. “There’s nothing here to be frightened of. What’s your name? Where did you come from? Not from around here, I’ll bet.”
Around here. Runs wrenched his fingers free of the astonishingly powerful grip and turned to flee, his legs animated by sheer panic.
“Hey, don’t go! Wait!”
His feet cleared the ground in great, measured strides. He had to get away before adults appeared on the scene. They might want him for a specimen. His only chance lay in the hope that the juvenile might forget about the encounter. Native juveniles were wont to do such. What could this one tell its adults anyway? Runs jumped the last rivulet and turned upstream, not pausing to think, not realizing he was making a straight line for the Burrows. He was not the fearless explorer he’d imagined himself to be: only a terrified youngster who’d run into far more than he’d bargained for.
The last words of the native juvenile to reach him were “Boy, can you run!” Then he was beyond hearing range.
He didn’t slow down until he reached the crest of the first ridge. Utterly exhausted and out of breath he collapsed and rolled onto his back, trying to recover his strength. He was bruising his tail but paid it no notice. His mind hurt worse than his body, aflame with the knowledge of what he’d gone and done. It didn’t even matter that his clothing was an unQuozl mess.
Suddenly it no longer seemed so daring, a mere prank, a challenge from a friend to be casually taken up. The odds had beaten him. He had been the one to actually encounter a native when all the previous expeditions had managed to avoid such contact.
When he could breathe freely again he sat up and stared downslope. He’d covered a lot of ground and there was no sign of the juvenile. How the natives could even balance themselves, much less run, on those narrow, tiny feet was something which continued to amaze Quozl biologists. There had to be some concealed mechanism for maintaining equilibrium they had yet to discover. But they could not run very fast. A quozl infant could outdistance all but the best of them.
Only then did it occur to him that he’d best take a roundabout route back to the colony and pay some attention to obliterating his tracks so that he could not be followed. As he started to do so it struck him that he knew only one way back home, the way he’d come. He knew only a single set of landmarks. He could not tak
e a circuitous route for fear of becoming hopelessly lost in these mountains.
He agonized over his choices for the rest of the day before resignedly starting back the way he’d come, carefully utilizing branches to wipe out any tracks he left, trying to keep to the rocks wherever possible. Where streams presented themselves he deliberately walked along them, forcing himself to suffer the watery chill. It took longer, but by the time he was within a day’s hike of the Burrow he was convinced the natives would not be able to follow him.
Chad burst into the cabin, ignoring the delicious aroma of fresh meat loaf browning in the woodstove. His sister spared him an indifferent glance before turning back to her magazine and boosting the volume on her Walkman another notch. The earphones rode her head like pink limpets.
“Hey, Mom, hey, Dad, guess what?”
His mother didn’t turn from her work. “Your father’s out back.”
He hesitated long enough to hear the familiar sounds of logs being split by the heavy, double-bladed axe. His mother stood by the sink stirring a large pitcher of cold tea. Maybe they didn’t have ice, but the stream water they piped to the cabin was plenty cold.
When she saw he wasn’t about to leave she finally turned to him, a tolerant, maternal smile on her face that he planned to quickly erase. “Did you have a nice hike, dear?”
“Did I ever! Boy, wow! Mom, you’ll never guess what I saw.”
“What did you see, Chadee?” She began filling glasses from the pitcher.
“I saw a …!” He hesitated. His excitement had rapidly outpaced his eight-year-old’s powers of description. “I don’t know what it was. But it was neat. It had long ears and big feet and …!”
“A rabbit.” His mother set glasses on the table, one facing each side.
“No, Mom, no!” Why couldn’t adults ever see? “It wasn’t a rabbit. Its face was different and it was a lot bigger.”
She remained unperturbed. “A jackrabbit. Your father says you don’t usually see them up this high, but sometimes …”
“NO!” That did it. She stopped what she was doing to stare at him. He spoke as earnestly as a saint. “Mom, it—wasn’t—a—rabbit. It had a tail, yeah, but it was kind of pointy, not fluffy like a rabbit’s. It was as big as you are, and it had real big eyes, and its teeth were like mine.” He opened his mouth and pointed to the incisors in question. “And it walked real straight, and it wore clothes, kind of like a girl’s bathing suit only with pockets and stuff ana belt, and it ran like he …”
His mother fixed him with a penetrating gaze. “Chad, you’ve been listening to your sister’s stories too much.”
“It’s not a story, Mom. I really saw it.” Suddenly one of those grandiose realizations that occasionally occur to children struck him with the force of the school bully’s fist. It was the immediate, sure, and certain knowledge that even if he were to bring into the cabin the entire advisory staff of the American Academy of Science together with the ghosts of Einstein, Franklin, and Curie, their combined arguments on behalf of what he’d seen would not be sufficient to convince Mrs. Alice April Collins of 15445 Chandler Boulevard, Burbank, California, of the truth.
So what he did instead was look across at the table and mumble softly, “Maybe it was a rabbit. Is lunch ready?”
“Soon,” said his mother, completely dismissing the incident from conversation, though he could hear her muttering under her breath. “We’ve got to get Mindy to stop telling him these scary bedtime stories.”
Chad’s older sister was a terrific pain in the ass, but she did have a talent for spinning the most wonderful tales. Particularly at night when it was dark and rainy and thundering outside and she could do her utmost to terrify her little brother. Chad yelled and complained when in reality he actually enjoyed his sister’s yarns, the more frightening the better. He could repeat them to his friends at school, wishing that he could be as good with words as she was. Sadly he was much more straightforward and a lot less imaginative. Math was much more to his liking. As his father put it, he was a steadying influence compared to his wildly imaginative sister.
So he knew he wasn’t suffering an unpredictable outburst of artistic inventiveness. He’d seen the creature and had even talked with it, if you could call that funny humming-whistling speech. It had bolted and run, faster than even Jimmy Stevens in the sixth grade could run. It had big feet and long legs, too long for its body. He knew what it was.
An alien. Or maybe some weird medical experiment that had escaped from a hospital or a zoo or a military installation somewhere. It wasn’t an animal. Funny talk was still talk, and it had been dressed, in strange oversized flip-flop type shoes and a bright shiny suit. The latter didn’t offer much protection in the mountains, but he supposed that if you were covered with fur you wouldn’t need many clothes.
Then there were those ears. Like rabbit ears, only thinner and with the edges curled toward each other, like a wet piece of cardboard. They tapered to points and when they bent it was almost as though they were jointed instead of wholly flexible. And the big eyes, staring back at him. Fortunately little teeth. He remembered neither fang nor claw. But he did remember one other thing.
“Hey, Mom?”
“What is it, Chad?” She was hovering around the sink again.
“Do you know of anything that has seven fingers?”
She hesitated and frowned at the sink, for the first time curious instead of simply dismissive. “Seven fingers? No, I don’t think so. You could ask your father, but I don’t think there’s any animal with seven fingers.”
“No big deal. Just asking.” He slid into his seat, selected a piece of bread from the stack in the middle of the table, and reached for the raspberry preserves.
“We’re running low. Leave some for everyone else.”
“Hey, Mom, I’m hungry. I’ve been exploring, remember?”
“I remember. Just save enough room to explore your vegetables.”
He nodded as he ladled seeded red gel onto a whole-wheat platform. Seven fingers. Seven plus seven was fourteen. Having fourteen fingers would be almost like having a whole extra hand.
Or maybe his mother was right and his sister’s stories were having an effect on him. He shrugged inwardly. His teachers said he could stand a little imagination.
He was almost finished with the bread when his mother spoke to him again. “Go and find your sister.”
“Aw, Mom. You know where Mindy is.”
“And so do you. Go and get her.”
“Okay, but she won’t listen to me. She’ll just make a face and say I’m interrupting her and that she wants to finish whatever junk she’s listening to.”
“I’ll finish her if she makes me wait supper. Tell her I sent you.”
“Right,” he said, having been officially deputized. He put down the half crust of bread, having sucked the preserves off the edge, and headed for the den.
His mother found strange thoughts shouldering aside concerns about overcooked beans and an inadequate supply of jam. Why seven fingers? Why not nine or ten or eleven? Had Mindy been telling the story, they would’ve been tentacles, with big toothy suction cups. She shrugged. Why not seven? As good a number as any.
She found herself staring at her own spread left hand. Dishwater wrinkles. In two years I’ll be forty. The big four oh. If she kept on that way she’d end up brooding all through supper. So she put it, together with all philosophic consideration of additional digits, out of her mind. By the time supper was over she’d forgotten the entire incident.
Chad couldn’t wait to get back to the reed marsh at the southwest end of the lake. But though he looked everywhere and spent the whole day, even risking his father’s disapproval by returning after sunset, he saw no sign of the creature. Nor the following day or the day after that.
Maybe he had imagined it. His sister would have understood, but he didn’t tell her because she’d only laugh and make fun of him. He never mentioned it to his mother again and not at all to his
father.
He visited the marsh every day for the next several weeks until he’d half convinced himself that what he’d seen was a figment of his imagination, a bear cub or something that shock and surprise had embroidered. He’d imagined it talking, imagined trying to shake hands with it, imagined the look of intelligence in its eyes. Nothing could run that fast anyway. It could even have been some other kid playing a practical joke on him, a prankish hiker. Like that guy who’d gone stomping around Washington in his fake Bigfoot suit, getting his picture in the papers and on tv until somebody spotted him changing in a gas station rest room. But if it had been a practical joker he was fast enough to make the Olympics.
By the time they left the valley to return to Los Angeles and the new school term he’d completely forgotten it.
Well, almost.
Runs-red-Talking unerringly found his way back to the Burrow. The camouflaged entrance to the underground world of the Quozl was exactly where he remembered it. Finding it was a great relief since he’d reached the end of his endurance, supplies, and the excuses he’d concocted to explain his absence.
Every pebble was as he remembered it, every bit of forest detritus firmly in place. No one had passed this way since he’d employed it during his flight to freedom.
He adjusted the twigs that comprised the concealed switch and stepped aside as the section of surface unhinged itself, rising to reveal the smooth-sided tunnel beyond. He paused for a last long look at the surface of Shiraz, inhaled a final lungful of unrecycled, unprocessed air, and then darted inside.
As the door shut he savored last glimpses of the shrinking outside world. Then he reached for the contact that would secure the barrier. His fingers never touched it.
“Stay your hand, youth. There is no need to lock the door since we were just going out.”
His heart plummeted as he whirled. There were four adults, all laden with journey packs and full equipment belts. Two males, two females, one of the latter carrying, judging from her slightly protruding pouch.