THIRTY
Cliff watched the sleeting, tarnished-silver rain slam down from an angry, growling purple cloud. This was like a more ferocious form of the cool autumnal storms he had waited out while hiking in the high Sierra Nevada, with crackling platinum lightning electrifying half the sky’s dark pewter. Crack and boom, all louder and larger than in the Sierra, maybe because it came from an atmosphere deeper and more driven, sprawling across scales far larger than planets. This violence was casually enormous, with clouds stacked like purple sandwiches up the silvered sky until they faded in the haze. The stench of wet wood mingled with a zesty tang of ozone, sharp in his nose and sinuses. He tasted iron in the drops that splashed on his outstretched tongue, and salt in the rough leaves they’d just eaten, plus a citrus burn in the vegetables they’d managed to scrounge from some trees nearby, before the hammering rainstorm arrived. Tastes of the alien lands.
“Rain near done,” Quert said. “Need go. Soon.”
Cliff could scarcely believe this prediction. “Why?”
“Folk find us.”
“You’re sure?”
“They know much. Even stones—” A gesture to distant sharp peaks, emerging from cottony clouds as the storm ebbed. “—speak to them. Always know.” A grave nod of Quert’s bare head said much.
Cliff nodded. Rain pattered down and smoke stained the air and it was hard to think. Quert made sense. The whole Bowl was deeply wired in some way. Its lands were vast but not stupid; there had to be a smart network that wove all this together. Still, most of the Bowl had to run on its own. No one or no thing could manage so huge a space unless the default options were stable, ordinary, and would work without incessant managing. Still …
No security from prying eyes would last for long. Their only advantage was that the Bowl was, while well integrated, still so vast. Even light took a while to cross it—up to twelve minutes, from the edge of the rim to the other edge. The delays sending text or faint voices across it, to Redwing on SunSeeker, were irritating. Especially when you could lose contact at any second.
The sky roiled with restless smoldering energy. Sudden gusts of howling wind drove the cold hard rain into their rock shelter. The pewter sky slid endlessly across them. But Quert had made them stop here in a long shaped-stone space, angular and ancient seeming, cut back into a hillside. They got in just before the slamming storm descended. Then after hours of huddling, the sky calmed. By the time they ate some of their food, heating it with burning twigs, a black slate wedge had slid overhead and the first hard drops spattered down.
Now it suddenly ended. Cliff turned to the others and said, “Pack up, gang.”
Sil and humans, they all grunted a bit with the effort of getting moving and splashed water on their fire. Cliff could still taste the sweet meat they had roasted there. It had made him wish for a robust California zinfandel, though perhaps those didn’t even exist anymore now. Maybe there wasn’t a place called California anymore back Earthside, he mused.
The succulent aromatic filets came from a big fat meaty doglike creature that had rushed at them hours before. When it came fast out of some big-leafed rustling bushes, they first noticed the curved yellow horns it carried on a broad, bony head. Then the bared teeth. It snarled and leaped, with an expression Cliff thought looked as greedy as a weasel in a henhouse. Most of them froze, for it was a true surprise—not even Quert and the Sils had seen it coming. But Aybe had caught it in midair with a laser shot that drilled through its surprisingly large brain cage and the thing fell limp and sprawling at their feet. It died with a shudder and a long, gut-deep gasp.
They ate the dark rich meat eagerly. It had a strong muscular frame that gutted easily. The Sil cracked its bones and sucked out the marrow. Cliff considered doing it—fat hunger!—but the rank, oily smell put him off. So he offered his bone around.
“Sure,” Aybe said, taking it. He sliced a line in it with his serrated blade and snapped the bone open over his knee. “Yum.”
Irma and Terry shook their heads, no. “Ugh,” Terry said. “I grew up on a low-fat diet. That was gospel for a half century, before we had nano blood policing.”
“Me, too,” Irma added, wrinkling her nose. “Our generation hated that fat smell.”
“I like it plenty,” Aybe said. “Must be—hey, what generation are you?”
Terry, Cliff, and Irma looked at each other. “We’re in our seventies,” Irma said.
“Gee, I’m forty-four,” Aybe said.
“Just a kid,” Terry said. “Surprised you made the grade. The rumor around Fleet was, nobody has enough experience before they’re in their fifties.”
Aybe smirked. “You old guys always say that.”
Irma chuckled. “The first forty years are for sex and reproduction. You used yours amassing a lot of tech abilities?”
“Sure did.” Aybe shrugged. “I wanted more than anything to get on a starship. Reproduction is overrated.”
They all laughed. “Women routinely stored eggs and you guys are never quite out of business,” Irma said. “Childbirth’s just easier below sixty.”
“How old do you think Redwing is?” Terry asked, finishing a slab of meat he had traded with Aybe in return for another bone.
“Gotta be a hundred,” Terry said.
“Older, I’d say. Went through the tail end of the Age of Appetite, he told me once. Pretty nasty time.”
“He’s a pretty nasty guy,” Aybe said, and then sucked loudly on a long bone until they could hear him drawing air all the way through it, a hollow slurp.
“Look,” Cliff said mildly, “plenty of people live to well over a hundred and fifty now. Redwing’s not what I’d call old.”
“By ‘now’ you mean ‘when we were Earthside,’ right?” Terry said. “God knows how old people live there now.”
That made everyone think of the abyss of time separating them from everyone they knew, Cliff saw. He let that ride for a while. Quert nodded to him, seeming to understand. Then it was time to move on.
They hiked away from their latest rough stone shelter into a clearing sky. There were local horizons here, but now the stray clouds skated over those near horizons and the sweet blue air above cleared further. Cliff had not seen before this sharp, sure atmosphere that he knew was deeper than anything on Earth. Yet now few clouds intruded into a shimmering sharp air. The piercing point star of the Bowl’s governing sky still hung above them, of course. But he and his team had moved along the slope of the Bowl for many days at high speeds, one way or the other, and now the star—Cliff had named it Wickramsingh’s Star, he recalled—shone not at the absolute center of this sky, but at a slight angle. Its jet seemed now to plunge more deeply toward them. Its streamers turned with elegant grace, pale orange filaments laced across the gauzy firmament. He watched its slow swirls as they slogged across a broad hill. The humans hung back from the Sil advance point men—though some of their Sil party, he had finally realized, were women. He still could not tell their sexes apart with assurance. The Sil didn’t seem to have strong binary distinctions between sexes in looks, dress, or behavior. Their occasional puzzled glances at Irma might come from that. Maybe, Cliff realized, humans were just more sexually restless than these Sil.
Shapes darted around in the forest. Cliff had seen that with constant sunlight, creatures had to be on guard all the time. Prey had eyes that looked broadly, like rabbits’ bulging eyes, or insects’ compound eyes—all designed to see at wide angles. Predators, as on Earth, had good depth of field, with eyes looking mostly forward, and wide-spaced for maximal 3-D perception.
Irma walked beside him, shouldering her pack where it wore on her, and said brightly, “Ever think, how come we’re seeing so many bipeds?”
Cliff tried to remember that he actually was a biologist. “Um. Hadn’t thought. But look, as I recall from lectures, anyway, Earthside bipedalism was really nothing more than an oddball vertebrate artifact.”
She adjusted her hat against the sunlight. “Those back there, the Kahalla, they couldn’t pass for us, not even in a dim room. Humanoids, though, for sure. Same basic design. But they’re from a tide-locked world, not like Earth at all. Odd.”
He kept watching the forest slipping by as they marched on. But theory was fun, too. He bit off a bit of a sweet root they’d pried up from the ground, under Quert’s instruction, and said, “Convergent evolution, must be. Those Kahalla prob’ly had four-limbed ancestors, just like us. Back Earthside, the arthropods always had limbs to spare, but not poor old mammals like us. We’re bipeds because we started with four limbs, and developed climbing skills, then tool use. That left two limbs for walking, so that pressure forced us to stand up.”
Irma took some of the sweet root, ate through all the rest of it, and smiled. She, too, endlessly scanned the passing trees and vines, and searched the skies. You learned to stay alert after so long in the field. “Yeah, Earthside, bipeds are really rare. Except for birds, who’ve got ’em because they invest so much in wings. For invertebrates, the closest thing to that vertical posture is something like a praying mantis.”
Cliff thought on that as he slapped a fat bug that wanted to use his hair for a nest. “A mantis has four legs.”
Irma’s voice always went up in pitch when she had an idea. “You’re skipping my point. We saw one biped far back, right? Big lumbering thing that ignored us, dunno why. Then the Sil. Now these Kahalla. All had heads with faces, two forward-looking eyes and jaws and a nose.”
Cliff saw her point. “Not a necessary arrangement, right. Just look at arthropod faces. Scary, because they’re just close enough to ours to look threatening, horrible.”
“Those Kahalla though, had pointy faces, eyes more on the side.”
“That’s a prey signature. I remember from high school, ‘Eyes front, likes to hunt; eyes on side, likes to hide.’ Seems to be a universal.”
“Plus they had fur,” Irma said. “We don’t, because we overheated when we ran long distances—so we lost the fur.”
Cliff nodded, recalling how lumbering those Kahalla figures had been. Bulky, ponderous, more like bears than people. And not a word had been spoken between them and the humans and Sil. Just glowers and postures, like the signals animals give. “Um, okay. So the Kahalla aren’t runners. Or talkers.”
Irma said, voice rising more, “The Bowl is telling us that smart aliens converge to a humanoid form.”
Cliff thought on that, never ceasing his scan of the forest around them. Or could be, somebody designed them.…
Quert was ahead of them and now turned. “Not the Folk. Not like, your word, humanoid. We say, Sil Shape. Same thing.”
“Um, yeah,” Irma said. “I wonder why?”
“Come from self design, for Folk,” Quert said. “Ancient.”
“So they have—what?—two arms and four legs?” Cliff asked.
“Some do. Many others, two legs. Still all Folk.”
Irma asked, “The Folk, do they really run things here?”
Quert gave a downward eye-gesture, which Cliff now knew expressed polite doubt. “Ice Minds, they above Folk.”
“How’s that work?” Cliff pressed.
“That changes now. Since you came. We Sil work for Ice Minds too, now.” Quert brandished his small communicator, a pyramidal solid that could deform into a flat screen. Cliff had yet to figure out how that worked.
Irma said, “What do you do for them?”
“Brought you to them.”
“That’s it?” Irma asked. “Why us?”
“You disturb. Folk call you ‘Late Invader’ because you new. Ice Minds want to see you. Know you. So we bring.”
“We’re just a small ship, passing by,” Irma said.
“Something about Glory, I hear from Ice Minds. They want to know what you are, going to Glory.” Quert gave a head-shrug. “Not sure what Glory be.”
“It’s a star right ahead of you,” Cliff said. “We can’t see it—your star’s too bright.”
“Star ahead?” Quert’s face went blank, which meant the alien was thinking, giving nothing away.
Irma said, “It’s a star a lot like yours, still so far away that it’s only a dot. Its planet has a biosphere with oxygen and nitrogen and the usual. We want to go there, live there.”
Quert kept the blank look, but the eyes jittered up, down, around. The alien was undergoing an entire conceptual shift.
Suddenly Cliff saw it. The Sil had been ushered into the view from the Bowl hull—the deep dark abyss of glinting stars—only lately. The Ice Minds had beckoned to them somehow, sent signals, and propelled forward the events Cliff’s team had then intersected. So Quert and the others had never seen the stars at all, until they brought Cliff’s team through the underground labyrinth and to where they could see the sliding panorama of the galaxy in full.
The Sil had been like people trapped in a cave, never shown the sky. Their world, the world of all who lived on the Bowl, was an endless warm paradise in steady daylight. Their sun and jet obliterated perspective. The ordinary denizens never saw the stars, or the great plane of the galaxy hanging in a black firmament, dark and strange and sprinkled with twinkling jewel stars.
That revelation had come to the Sil when they were restless and angry. The Folk had suppressed them for ageless times, but now they knew where they were, who they were. All that had exploded into their world only lately. Cliff’s team had confirmed new truths, and so had made many tragedies come to pass—the battle with the skyfish, the bombing and firestorms of the Sil cities, so much else.
Cliff started to say some of this to Quert. The alien still had the stiff fixed face, giving nothing away while it thought. But then movements caught their attention.
The point Sil stopped, gestured, and muttered something in a low whisper. Head and arm gestures: something ahead, spread out.
They all followed their standard tactic, moving off to both sides and seeking cover, then moving carefully forward. The humans had learned this in training, fire-and-maneuver. Each member of the Sil and human team moved only when others could cover with fire from lasers, arm-arrows.
Ahead, a faint repeating clatter came through the trees and vines.
Beyond, the land cleared. Cautiously they worked their way to a vantage point on a small hill. A strip of neatly arranged, emerald green agricultural fields stretched into the distance to their left and right. Simple farm machinery worked in them, making whack-whack-whack noises. Directly ahead, the forest resumed several kilometers away. The crop was yellow and purple shoots that seemed to spray out like arrows from a thick brown trunk. These were three or four meters tall, Cliff judged, like trees with spokes flying out. The spokes were fat and had wide, fanlike flowers along their lengths. The air carried a fine mist of—what? Pollen?
“We can cross that at a run,” Aybe said.
Quert pointed to figures working in the field. They had trucks and a robot harvester that worked away, chopping off the shoots and dropping them into the trucks. The machinery worked with a regular whump whump whump. A breeze brought a heady sweet scent like orange blossoms with a cutting undertang. Everything moved with a slow rhythm, and the scene reminded Cliff of a monotonous summer he had spent on a farm in California’s Central Valley. He close-upped them and said, “They’re the same kind we left behind, those humanoids mesmerized by that ancient rock life. Kahalla.”
“These special Kahalla evolve for farm work,” Quert said. “They stay here always on farm. Birthing and dying, all done here.”
Irma asked, “They live in a village all their lives?”
“Content. In balance.” Quert conferred with the other Sil in quick, scattershot bursts of unintelligible talk. They all looked wary to Cliff, as nearly as he could judge. The Sil had complex suites of expressions that darted across their faces, mostly coded in their eye-moves and the light-browed ridgelines above. Quert turned to the humans. “This Aybe right. Run fast across. See there?”
Nearly directly across from them was a complex of low buildings the tan color of dried mud. “Their hatchery. Few Kahalla there most times. We cross, the Kahalla not see.”
Cliff tried to take this in. A special form of Kahalla just for the grunt labor of farming? Had the Folk specially bred for that? And … hatchery?
They moved through the cover of a long winding grove of zigzag trees. He and Irma thought the zigzag strategy was to get more sunlight under a constant sun, which meant more exposed foliage turned to the direction of the star, a reddish dot fixed firmly in the sky. The jet’s filmy light they ignored. Bristly branches and coiling vines sprawled along the thick zigzag trunks to harvest the constant sunlight. That made them useful cover, because the branches were thin at the top and thicker at the tree base. Easy to slip among and elude any watching eyes.
Warily they stopped within easy view of the tannin brick buildings. As a Californian, Cliff seldom saw ceramic slabs stacked to great heights; his instinct said they were earthquake vulnerable. But there were no quakes here at all. He saw through binocs furry figures moving with lumbering, swaying bodies on two legs, moving slowly among the brick walls. He pointed to them.
“Friends not,” Quert said with narrowed eyes and edgy eye-clicks.
“These Kahalla will turn us over to the Folk?” Terry asked.
Quert said, “Must,” and gave a downturned eye-move.
The other Sil shuffled and eye-clicked in what seemed agreement, their feet shuffling, impatient. They seemed to feel there was no time to waste in pondering this problem. No point in trying to go around the long farming strip that faded away into the light tan color of the distance, which came from simple dust haze. No telling how long this farm was. An odd way to cultivate; why not in squared-off plots so you minimized the travel distance?
“No time to think much,” Aybe said. “Ready to run?”
They set off at a good pace. The Sil got out in front right away with their long graceful strides, taking long slow deep breaths as their feet came down. They seemed to have evolved for running. Humans had, too, but not this well. Cliff wondered if their home world, with somewhat lower gravity, had better shaped them for this part of the Bowl. Again he wondered, as sweat collected in his eyebrows and trickled down, stinging his eyes, what the Sil’s agenda was. Getting out from under the Folk, yes. But those big birds ran this place, and a few puny humans surely could not make much difference. A puzzle. But without the Sil, they’d have been nabbed by the Folk long ago. He let it pass.
They made a good fast run across the fields, running close to the curious trees. The Kahalla were upwind of their crossing route, too, so that might be an advantage. Cliff was surprised at how easily he ran. He was in better physical condition now from so long on the run, and the local grav seemed lower here, too. But Quert’s head turned, surveying the whole area, as did all the Sil. They were worried.
The rough rectangular buildings Quert called a hatchery loomed up, two stories high and no windows. They entered the complex, panting and sweaty, and made their way down the main corridor between the buildings. There were no Kahalla around at all. A few zigzag trees lined this main street of the place, their wood worn and gray. The Sil went down side passages, doing reconn, and in a few moments came running back fast. They shouted a word in Sil language and formed a defensive arc facing two passageways. Automatically the humans gathered in behind them, drawing weapons, looking anxiously around.
Only when a Sil launched one of its arm-arrows did they look up.
Things like meter-wide spiders came over the lip of the roof. They were white and clacked as they moved, surging down the wall on flexing black palps. Their legs were bristly and black; big angry red eyes glared at the sides of a squashed face.
The first Sil arm-arrow lanced through one that was halfway over the edge of the roof. It scrabbled at the wall and fell with a smack at their feet. The Sil who had nailed it stepped forward, shot at another of the attackers, hit it at dead center of its circular body—then bent and plucked the arrow out, inserting it quickly back in the air sheath.
The Sil were shooting at the things now, and the humans used their lasers. But there were plenty of the things, and they kept coming.
They move more like crabs than like spiders, Cliff thought as the Sil fell back. He aimed at one of the things and hit it, but it just kept climbing down the wall toward them. His shot had gone through it near its edge, but that was not enough, apparently.
They made small, shrill chippering sounds. They moved sideways with quick sure moves.
Now Cliff recalled a relayed message from Beth when they had broken out of their captivity. “Spidows,” he said.
Irma got the reference. “Those were huge, they said. These aren’t.”
“Local adaptation,” Aybe said. “Our lasers blow through them but don’t kill, most of the time.”
Five of the things took on a Sil. They crawled up its legs and bit deep with claws. The Sil howled. It batted at them and lurched away. That unnerved the other Sil as rivers of the midget spidows rushed down from other roofs and through the lanes nearby. Their high, shrill cries became a shriek. The humans huddled behind a thin line of Sils who were running out of their arm-arrows.
Quert was driving arm-arrows into the spidows but then shouted in Sil and then in Anglish, “Back through!”
Cliff turned and saw a Sil had found, down a side corridor, a big frame door that opened. They all turned and rushed there. The spidows’ shrill cries rose as they came after the running Sil and humans. Several Sil tore branches off the zigzag trees along the way, snapping them off. They got through the doorway and into a big high room. The door slammed. Sil secured it.
Illumination streamed down from a ceiling that simmered with ivory light. The place reeked of some sullen odor. It was damp and warm here, and the humans looked at each other, eyes wide, still surprised by the sudden ferocity of the spidow attack. The Sil muttered to each other. They were all standing under the heat beating down from above, panting in moist air flavored with an odd stinging taste.
“Were … were those spiders?” Aybe asked.
“More like crabs,” Cliff said.
“They have a shell and move with a sideways crawl, lots of legs,” Irma said.
“If there weren’t so many, we could just tromp on them,” Terry said.
“But there are!” Aybe was scared and covered it with anger.
The Sil stirred and murmured and Quert listened to them intently. The humans talked but no ideas emerged. The high keening cries of the spidows came through the walls. They all knew they were trapped, and the shock of it was sinking in, Cliff saw.
“Let’s see what there is here. What this place is,” Cliff said. It was good to get them focused on something beyond their fears. They murmured, shuffled, and started to look around.
Around them stood cylindrical towers with big fat orange spheres arrayed in a matrix. There were some kind of ceramic tubes laced through the crude baked brick frame, and those felt warm to the touch.
“What are these things? A whole room full,” Irma said.
Quert said, “Kahalla eggs. Hatch here,” and took two other Sil to prowl the room. Cliff followed down the line of Kahalla egg cylinder holders. The warm damp air was cloying. Heads jerked toward a scraping noise. They all saw a white carapace of a spidow scuttling away. It left behind a ripped-open Kahalla egg that dripped brown fluids on the red clay floor. The spidow had been eating it. A Sil stabbed it with a shaft of wood it had yanked off a zigzag tree outside. The spidow writhed, worked its claws against the shaft, and died with a faint squealing gasp.
They found another a few moments later. Some had gotten in here, Cliff supposed, and were eating Kahalla eggs. “Food source,” Irma said.
Several of the big orange spheres were already spattered over the ceramic floor, their insides gone. Cliff followed, still dazed by the speed of events. He shook his head, rattled. As the Sil searched the aisles of egg-holding cylinders Cliff kept up, feeling pretty useless, and then asked Quert, “The Kahalla look kind of like us—two legs, same body shape. But they lay eggs?”
“Kahalla way,” Quert said. Its eyes were wary, searching the whole room. “Stack their eggs here. Let hatch. Safe so they can work their fields.”
“Uh, but the spidows—that’s what we call them—they come and eat?”
An eye-click of agreement. “Been so, long time. We call those things upanafiki. Pests, are.”
“They’re smart enough to get into these hatcheries.”
Quert sniffed and gave soft barking sounds with a head-jerk, which seemed to be the Sil equivalent of laughter. All the Sil joined in. Some alien inside joke, Cliff suspected. Or was Sil humor a category outside human comprehension? Quert stopped the quiet barking laugh and said, “Kahalla not smart.”
“Egg layers…” Cliff tried to get his head around all this.
Irma said, “Earthside we have monotremes, mammal egg-layers. They’re very old, Triassic maybe.”
Cliff shook his head. “Forget about parallels to Earth. So: smart egg-layers who are humanoid tool-users. What the hell, with evolution on the Bowl, all bets are off.”
Quert said, “Upanafiki many. Kahalla crave land. Upanafiki keep Kahalla numbers down. Kahalla and upanafiki—” Quert thrust its bony hands together. “Always. Fight. Dance.”
Aybe said, “Where did these Kahalla come from? What world?”
Quert said, “Kahalla means in your tongue One Face Folk.”
Terry got it. “So they come from a planet tidally locked to its star? On their side it was always sunny. They had an adaptation advantage when they arrived at the Bowl, over people like us who need night. Makes sense.”
Quert gave an eye-click of agreement. “Spread widely. They are conservative. Folk use them. Not good allies for us.”
Cliff frowned. Evolutionary theory in the middle of a fight …
“Come see this,” Irma called. She was at the other end of the room. They followed her up some crudely fashioned stairs of gray clay ceramic. The dusty second floor was like the first but Irma pointed to a hole in its ceiling. “Looks like they dug down through.”
Cliff crouched, jumped, and caught the edge of the hole. Some of it crumbled away, but he held on and pulled his head through the meter-wide opening. This might be risky, but he was curious—and hanging there, he saw the roof now deserted. A nearby piece of wood caught his eye. He held on with one hand and shuffled a slim shaft nearby into the hole, letting it drop. Then he followed it, landing neatly. Low grav had its uses.
Irma picked up the slender piece of wood. “It has a tip like flint. Those small spidows—they’re tool-users.”
“Keep Kahalla stable,” Quert said, glancing upward. “They outside on ground. We go this way.”
Cliff and Irma looked askance at the alien. Quert went to the stairwell and shouted orders in the slippery Sil speech. Terry and Aybe came up with them. “Those spidows,” Terry said, “they’re chipping at the door with something.”
Irma needed help, but in surprisingly short order their entire team, humans and Sil alike, made the leap to the ceiling hole. Those already on the roof grabbed their hands and hauled them out, onto the flat roof. It was made of tan triangular bricks. Now Cliff could see Quert’s plan. The hatchery buildings were close together, and the Sil could leap from one roof to the next. So could the humans. The Sil were remarkably calm; they had met this foe before. They started leaping across. Cliff looked down as he took a running jump across. The spidows were clustered around the door to the building they had just left. Several of them held bigger wood shafts, also with blackened hard tips that seemed to have been turned on a fire.
Irma came next. She landed with one foot halfway onto the next roof lip. Cliff grabbed her and tugged her in. Terry and Aybe followed. By that time, most of the Sil were across to the next building, looking unhurried but quick.
They all ran and leaped, ran and leaped, and soon were at the far end of the hatchery buildings. There the Sil slung a thin wire around nearby trees, throwing it with a kind of boomerang hook that wrapped around a tree trunk. Then a Sil attached the wire to its backpack solar panel source, made some adjustments, hit a command switch—and the wire expanded, puffing up into a thick rope that hands could grab. Cliff blinked; a useful trick he had never seen.
They descended on that rope, belaying a bit to break their sliding descent. Cliff and Irma leaned over the side of the building to glimpse the spidows while others took the rope down. Spidows were still working on the door, chipping with crude spikes. But then some Kahalla came in from a side corridor, shouting. The spidows turned, and a battle began.
The spidow’s bristly palps moved in a jerky blur. The Kahalla had simple hoes or similar farm tools. They struck down hard on the spidows and pinned them. But there were a lot, and some Kahalla got overwhelmed.
This was nature red in tooth and claw in a way he’d never seen. There were over a hundred spidows and maybe a dozen Kahalla—a melee. As they watched, Irma said, “A fight over reproduction? Nasty.”
Quert had come over to them and looked down, unsurprised. “Folk set rules. Keep Kahalla from farming more and more. Use upanafiki to keep not many Kahalla eggs to hatch. These upanafiki pests for us. Their war with Kahalla never end.”
“The Folk don’t stop this?” Irma asked.
“Folk want this.” Quert paused, searching for the right Anglish words. “Equilibrium. Stasis.”
As Cliff watched five spidows swarm fast over a struggling Kahalla humanoid, he thought, Nightmare spiders on a caffeine high. The Kahalla toppled and vanished beneath the swarming spidows. He recalled a remark heard long ago, Flattery isn’t the highest compliment—parasitism is.
“Damn!” Irma’s shrill shout jerked him out of his thoughts.
He saw several spidows, their legs grappling for purchase over the lip of the roof, twenty meters away. They had come up the wall. They made a sharp hissing, their legs clicking with darting moves.
He and Irma had been distracted and now with Quert were the only ones left on the roof. Quert was already ahead of them and took the rope with an easy grace. Down Quert slid, shouting back “Come fast!” Irma went next, and Cliff turned to take a laser shot at the mass of spidows surging across the tan brick roof. The bolts punched holes easily enough, but the spidows did not stop. A bolt to the center did work, and one of the things flopped down. But now they were five meters away. Cliff leaned down and plucked the securing anchor of the rope. No time to slide down it now. He couldn’t be sure the spidows couldn’t use it. The black rope was firmly fixed in the trees thirty meters away, so he just grabbed it and ran off the edge of the roof. He dropped, then swung.
His breath rasped and he ignored a snap in his shoulder. He tumbled on the descent and tried to pull himself up the rope as it carried him toward the trees. His swing brought him boot-forward, so when he hit the branches of a zigzag tree the leaves lashed him. One limb caught him smack in the face. He hit another, and a sharp pain lanced into his ribs. He gasped and slid down the rope, a nearly vertical drop now. The zigzag tree trunk smacked his thigh, but he managed to get his boots under him. He sprawled when he hit.
As he was rolling away, his ribs sent him a lance of pain and his vision blurred for a moment. He lay there gasping and hands grabbed him. They heaved him up and Terry shouted, “Gotta run!” So he did. Not very well.
The spidows were running through the trees already, lots of them. Their chippering calls were loud now. But the spidows were small and if humans were good at anything, he thought, it was sure as hell good old running.
For a while, though, until they no longer saw the spidows behind them, it was more like limping for him. He was worn out.