“Hmm. I believe I know what you mean. Local color. Are you absolutely sure—”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I wish I weren’t.”
“All right, let me see.” For a moment her beautiful blue eyes acquired the absent, searching expression typical, on occasions, to implant users. She was looking something up or consulting with somebody. Berdan, a lifelong implant user himself, noticed but saw nothing odd about it, since he often looked the same way himself.
Her eyes focused.
“Okay, Talisman, at the south pole, is definitely the place you want to start with—not the town itself, mind you, which, it says here, is a perfectly respectable place—but a sort of suburb down there they call Watner.”
Again the pause and the absent look. “Get yourself a gun, since you’re not wearing one, leave most of your money aboard ship in a nice safe bank account, and keep your spare hand on your wallet, anyway.”
“Thanks,” Berdan replied. “I already have too much gun, which I don’t know how to use, will probably need all my money down on Majesty, and, as for spare hands…” He held his up, both of which were full of luggage.
The girl smiled and shook her head. “Well in that case, take any of those Broach booths over there, deposit three silver ounces, and tell the implant receptor where you want to go. In theory, you’ll come out in another booth, exactly like that one, at the other end.”
“Thanks,” Berdan replied. “Especially for the ‘in theory.’ I really needed that. Uh, do you happen to have change for a gold two-ounce superlysander?”
“Nothing’s ever easy with you, is it?” She accepted the massive coin from Berdan, one of the three he’d offered Spoonbender, handed him his change—a great deal of it—and a plastic company token.
“Something they won’t tell you in the tourist brochures because it’s bad for business: watch out for rats. They don’t have any natural enemies down there, and the population’s exploded, like rabbits in Australia. Now take that to the nearest unoccupied booth, insert it in the lighted slot, and off you go.”
And good riddance, Berdan was certain she was thinking. He always seemed to affect girls that way.
He mumbled thanks and followed her instructions. Finding an unoccupied booth was easy, he walked over to the nearest one, set his bag down, slid the transparent folding door back, picked up his bag again and entered the confined space. Setting the bag down once more, he slid the door closed behind him.
On the left wall, a small slot lit up, and he “heard” a voice via his implant. “Please insert token and specify destination.”
Talisman, he thought, making sure he had both bags in hand again. I’ll try to take the rest by easy stages. Guard your wallet. Learn to shoot. Watch out for rats.
A small display confirmed his destination had been entered. He inserted the token.
Before him, a blinding, brilliant blue dot appeared on the opposite wall. It expanded into a blue-edged circle which grew until it met the metal edges of the booth. The receiver must have been outdoors: through the aperture he could see the dirt roads, boardwalks, and makeshift buildings of a typical new-colony town.
Ready or not, Dalmeon Geanar, here I come!
He took a breath and stepped forward.
Before his right foot entered the Broach—and before he could stop himself—something crackled.
The picture blurred and shifted.
Berdan pitched forward into a sea of small green leaves and sank in over his head.
As he’d feared, he’d fallen on his face—
And into a hole.
Chapter VII: The Sea of Leaves
It was like being dropped into a room full of bright green ping-pong balls.
Berdan didn’t sink far into the leafy morass, but without any place to plant his feet, nowhere he could push with his hands, he found he couldn’t stand up again. Instead, all he could do was lie on his back, helpless and floundering.
Overhead, the sky of Majesty was a bright and cloudless blue. Everything else, as far as he could see (which, lying in this position, wasn’t far) was an endless ocean of green, every possible shade and hue and saturation. Scattered here and there among the leaves were clusters of small, rather disappointed-looking pale green flowers and clumps of berries of about the same size and color.
The air was hot and damp.
All about him wafted the smells of lush vegetation, the sharp tang of the leaves and stems he’d broken, the sweeter breath of new growth, the richer, loamy odor—swampy, like that of just-picked mushrooms—of whatever lay beneath. He dreaded sinking into that organic-smelling darkness, never to resurface.
According to everything he’d seen and heard, the mossy biosphere of Majesty would tolerate no other plant life, but existed in ready symbiosis with countless animal organisms living on or beneath its surface—as if it were the vast, green, living ocean it resembled. Numerous Earth-native species had been transplanted to Majesty, although often with a kind of success that hadn’t always been deliberate. Since the planet’s discovery, many types of Earthian animals had found a home in the worldwide moss, including thousands of species of birds, and, it seemed everybody kept telling him, hordes of large ferocious rats.
Watch out for the rats.
By some happy chance, he still held onto both his Kevlar zipper bag and his father’s briefcase. With his arms spread wide, they helped to support his weight.
Since he couldn’t do much of anything else at the moment, he began deliberate breathing, as slow and deep as he could manage it, feeling his heart beat, willing it to slow, a difficult task in the panic-generating atmosphere of a steambath.
As he relaxed, his brain began to work again. Some of the shock and surprise wore off. Berdan began to be aware of other things besides the sky, the light, and the odors, among them the soft sighing of a gentle breeze rustling what must have been quintillions of miniature leaves paving the entire planet. Maybe, he found himself thinking, with this much vegetation—and not much of anything else—you might even be able to hear the stuff growing. Maybe this was what he heard, or imagined he heard, now: a sort of odd creaking which—
Berdan jumped, as much as he was able to, and almost lost hold of his bags. Breathing, despite himself, in rapid, shallow gasps again, he thought he could feel some small, hard-jointed, many-legged crawly thing on the back of his neck. With careful, slow movements, he drew his outspread arms together, held both handles, bag and briefcase, with one hand—their weight on his chest pushed him down further into the leaves—and reached up with the hand he’d managed to free.…
Nothing.
Well, whatever it had been, he’d given it all the time in the world to get away—
—or to squiggle down the back of his suit!
At this spine-chilling thought, Berdan squirmed, sinking deeper with every movement, until the leaves began closing over his face like living quicksand.
Panic threatened to seize him.
He refused to let it.
Again he forced himself to relax, taking deep breaths (after all, he thought, they might be his last, and he might as well enjoy them), and spread his arms out again.
It didn’t work.
This stuff wasn’t water, or even quicksand for that matter. Even when he settled down, stopped sinking, he didn’t float back to the top. It was hopeless. He wouldn’t be able to hold still and would go on sinking, deeper every minute, until—
“Screeeeegh!”
“Yaaaaaaagh!”
Behind him, something much larger than whatever creepy-crawly he’d worried about earlier bellowed and reared up over his head. Berdan screamed at the same time. A shadow fell over his face. Huge and black, it blotted out the sun.
The first, most hideous and lasting impression the thing made on Berdan’s mind was of legs, thousands upon thousands of legs. The horror rearing above him seemed to be composed of nothing but restless, wiggling, spike-jointed legs.
It was at least as wide as Berdan was tall, about th
e same color as the vegetation, and smelled like a stack of dinner dishes which had been left in the sink for a week. What he could see of it was twice his height. More, perhaps: he realized, in some remote part of his mind, it must be a great deal longer than it appeared to support the portion standing up among the leaves. Either that or it was built like a bird, a great deal lighter than it looked.
He noticed the jaws, similar in construction to the legs, restless in the same way, three huge, sweeping hooks of shiny, chitinous material, with odd bristly patches and dull-toothed saw edges moist and glistening on their inside surfaces.
The monster opened and shut them as it bent closer to Berdan.
Watch out for the rats?
Let the rats watch out for themselves!
For his own part, the frightened boy was hurrying to get his father’s briefcase open, to get at the plasma gun, without losing anything else inside it or his other bag. With panic sweeping through him again, he couldn’t remember whether any charge had been left in the pistol. He didn’t think so. The handle of his zipper bag was looped over his wrist, interfering as he clawed at the lock of the case—until he remembered he must use his thumb to open it.
The clashing jaws descended.
The nightmarish thing froze. It seemed to glance up, past its intended victim, out across the Sea of Leaves toward some distant threat. It swayed back and forth as if trying to hear or see better—Berdan hadn’t noticed whether it had eyes or not—whirled about, and left the helpless boy by himself.
Silence fell once more.
Berdan tried his best to sit up among the leaves to see what sort of unimaginable, horrible thing it had taken to frighten the first monster away. Whatever it was, he didn’t want anything to do with it! All he accomplished with the effort, however, was to sink deeper into the vegetation surrounding him. Forcing himself to stillness, he began to hear what the monster had heard first, an eerie whistling noise—several eerie whistling noises—far away but coming closer.
Watch out for the rats.
Groaning with terror and fatigue, he went on groping, trying to get at his father’s plasma gun, every wasted, useless motion pushing him deeper into the leaves. Something whiplike, and not green at all, slapped across his fingers.
It felt just like the seminaked tail of a large, energetic rat.
“Hey!” He still hadn’t managed to open the briefcase. To Berdan, it felt like a nightmare he suffered all the time where he tried to run faster and faster, only to stay in the same place. Before he could unlock it, the case was snatched out of his hand by what appeared to be a small, eyeless blue-gray velvet-covered snake.
“Hey, cut that out!”
His other bag was wrenched away.
Something—some rough pair of somethings—seized him by both smartsuited ankles.
He’d just become aware of this development, when another pair of blue snakes, identical to the one which had taken his case, wrapped themselves around his wrists, pulling against one another until he was stretched flat on his back again.
He began to rise out of the leaves.
In this position, staring, whether he wanted to or not, at the sky overhead, it was difficult to see what sort of thing or things had grabbed him and his possessions. He was grateful that a snakelike object like the ones around his wrists and ankles hadn’t also wrapped itself around his neck. The multiple whistling noises were so loud by now they hurt his ears. They seemed to arise from all around him. With a growl of anger and frustration, he twisted his neck—the attempt was painful—and was rewarded with a peculiar sight.
Each of his outstretched limbs was being held, four or five feet above the ocean of leaves, by a creature which seemed strange, even to a boy used to associating with aliens (and other nonhumans) every day. While it was their limbs—soft-textured, tapering tentacles which had reminded him of velvet-covered snakes—he was in contact with, the principal thing he noticed about each of them was the eye.
Each had only one, but, somehow, it was enough.
It was as if a three-legged starfish had been formed from plasticine modeling clay, the legs stretched as far as the clay could go without tearing, perhaps six or seven feet in total length from tentacle tip to tentacle tip. The imaginary sculptor had sprinkled them with blue-gray flocking and pushed a basketball-sized transparent marble through the center, so it stuck out on both sides.
Berdan could look straight through the creatures.
The one thing obstructing this view as a softball-sized black globular organ hanging in the center of the larger, transparent one. He guessed it served as a retina, the place where light was focused and converted into images.
Berdan remembered he didn’t have to guess. He’d absorbed a brochure about this planet just before stepping into the Broach booth. He concentrated, and…
The information burst into his mind in words and bright-colored images: the things carrying him were taflak, the intelligent but primitive natives of this world which Confederates called Majesty. They lived on what they called “the Sea of Leaves,” a name for the entire planet in their own curious, whistling tongue. The object at the center of the taflak eye was more than just a retina (although its light-absorbing outer surface served that purpose, too), it was their brain.
And they were supposed to be friendly.
“Hey, you guys!” Berdan wriggled a wrist, trying to attract the attention of one of the taflak carrying him. “Hey, put me down a second, will you?”
The creature ignored him.
He tried the taflak on the other side with the same result.
Two more of the odd natives were helping to carry him. Kicking his legs, however, only caused their fuzzy tentacles to tighten about his ankles until both of his feet began to grow cool and numb and fall asleep. He wondered where they intended taking him, how long this peculiar journey would last, and what they’d do with him when they got there—and was sorry he’d thought to ask.
He also wondered how it was that the taflak, with just three skinny tentacles apiece, somehow managed to keep their heads (a figurative turn of phrase at best) above the weeds, when he himself, with four much broader limbs, had settled toward the center of the planet. The half dozen natives escorting his bearers were even doing cartwheels—revolving limb over limb, while at the same time passing the stubby, long-bladed spears they carried from the tentacle about to hit the “ground” before them to another high above their plump, triangular torsos.
As soon as he’d asked himself this question, he knew from the information his implant had absorbed back aboard ship that the taflak were of much lighter construction than human beings—it was the same idea he’d had about the many-legged monster. For millions of years they’d evolved in this environment, among this infinity of leaves, and the ends of their tentacles splayed into hundreds of fine-stranded supporting “fingers,” each over a foot long.
An unassisted human or a simian, without such support, would sink into the denser growth to a depth in the biosphere sufficient to immobilize him, where he’d die of suffocation or starvation (dehydration being inconceivable) if he wasn’t eaten alive first by the voracious wildlife rumored to infest it. Berdan’s smartsuit might have let him survive—at least until things got around to the “eaten alive” part—but it was old, worn, and had never been subjected to a test like this. He’d never even been able to get the hood, which lay limp and useless across his chest, to fasten around his head in the proper manner.
He could sure use that Brightsuit now, he thought, if he had some ham and eggs.
More than a hundred foolhardy individuals, his implant told him—Confederate, not native taflak—disappeared without a trace on this planet every year.
Watch out for the rats.
His implant also informed him the monstrous beast which had tried to eat him earlier was a “can-can,” so called because its long rows of many legs (three in number, two where one would have expected them to be, and a third where most Earth animals kept their back
bones) resembled those of a human chorus line. Berdan’s life had been in real danger. However, compared to other, more hungry and dangerous things lurking deeper in the Sea of Leaves, the can-can was regarded by the colonists who’d written the brochure as a minor pest, a spoiler of picnics, a tipper-over of garbage cans, in short, a giant thousand-legged cockroach.
Time passed.
The taflak carrying Berdan, while ignoring his attempts to communicate with them (his internal travelogue maintained that many of the Majestan natives spoke intelligible, if somewhat high-pitched, English) loosened their uncomfortable grip on his ankles. One by one their cartwheeling escorts began switching off with them, sharing the burden. As soon as the pins-and-needles tingling went away, he grew so relaxed in this position he surprised himself by dozing off.
As a result, he didn’t know how much time had passed—he’d been far too busy to ask his implant what time it was when he’d first fallen into the leaves—when the taflak slowed, took up a new, more excited whistling, and were greeted by several dozen more of their own kind, making the same sorts of sounds.
They’d come to a village.
Dozens of noisy individuals ran out to greet them, some of the greeters perfect miniatures of the hunters who carried Berdan. These small ones wheeled up to examine their find, or chirped at their fathers and elder brothers until they were given the spears to carry the last few steps—or revolutions, Berdan corrected.
Everybody, it seemed, loves a parade.
Having achieved a degree of civilization, the taflak were no longer quite as much at home on the Sea of Leaves—any more than the average human would be in the kind of equatorial jungle where the race evolved—as the can-can. Also, since they employed fire and were obvious toolmakers and users, they required a firmer, more stable base for their activities than the vegetation itself provided.