Chaos Mode

CHAPTER 5—HALLUCIGEN

DARIUS was glad to reach the shore. The crab had been bad, but the Anomaly had been worse. He preferred to have his feet on the ground, so that he could at least fight or flee in good order. He had hardly covered himself in glory on the boat!

The boat scraped against the shallow water at the edge, and wedged in place. Now the humans and the horse could get out—but what of Burgess? They had lifted him in, but the special strength and coordination had been provided by Seqiro, who had governed their minds. Now the horse’s mind was exhausted, so they couldn’t do that. Seqiro, resting as they forged slowly on across the lake, had recovered enough to link them telepathically, but that was all. Probably the telepathy extended only in the small space they occupied, being at low ebb.

“Will we need this boat again?” he inquired, looking around.

Nona shrugged. Colene, as usual, made the decision: “No. We’re getting well away from here.”

“Then we can destroy it.” He took the axe and started chopping at the gunwale, after Colene had led Seqiro to the shore.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Colene cried. “It’s a nice boat!”

“I am making it possible for Burgess to float his own way out,” he replied.

She was quiet, recognizing the sense of it. Before long he had two cuts through the gunwale, and was able to bash out the intervening section. Burgess floated through and onto the water without difficulty.

“What about Anomaly?” Nona asked.

“Say, yes,” Colene agreed. “We can’t just let it die like that.”

So Darius cut the strands of the net, and pulled it clear, freeing the monster. In a moment Anomaly used its tentacles to haul its head over the remaining gunwale. Then it gave a great heave and splashed into the water. It swam away. Darius wouldn’t have cared to say so, but he was just as glad; the thing had been a terror, but he had no stomach for killing a creature already rendered helpless.

“I guess it’ll know not to bother us again,” Colene said, almost wistfully.

“We should move on into the forest,” Darius said. “But if there are no crabs here—”

“Yeah, we’re all so tired,” Colene agreed. “Say! Suppose we made a fire? Most wild creatures are afraid of fire, aren’t they? Maybe we’d be safe beside it.”

Darius considered that notion, and liked it. He brought out one of the magic firesticks he had gotten from Colene.

“Uh, wait, Darius,” Colene said. “Those matches don’t set fire to just anything. You have to have dry tinder. Anyway, we shouldn’t waste them, because we don’t know when we’ll ever get more. We should save them for real emergencies.”

Darius, about to protest that he did know about tinder, stifled it, realizing that she had a point. One of those matches had enabled him to escape captivity in a foreign Mode, and might be needed for that again. “How can we make fire?”

That stopped them. There were supposed to be ways, but none of them seemed to be proficient in such techniques. Colene sent out a mental picture of rubbing two sticks together, but without much hope. Probably early man got fire by saving it from a natural blaze started by a lightning strike.

And there was an idea: once they had a fire, they should save it. Except that they weren’t quite sure how to do that, either. If they had the right ceramic container for a firepot, and the right slow-burning material, and could stop it from smoking too badly—

“Maybe Nona can make fire magically,” Colene suggested wryly.

Nona shook her head. “This was beyond the power of the despots of my Mode,” she said. “They could make the illusion of fire, as could we all, and could transform materials, so that it looked as if they had been burnt, but—”

“So that’s what the Knave did, when he was trying to rape me!” Colene said indignantly. “He made it seem as if my clothing was burning off, but there was no heat. He must have transformed my clothing to dust, with the illusion of flames.”

“Yes. I believe that much of despot magic was actually the appearance of other magic. So my own powers must be similarly limited.”

“How can you be sure?” Colene asked.

Nona paused. “I suppose I could try it. My other magical powers manifested over time, surprising me. There might be another one forming. But even so, it might not work in this other reality.”

“Try it,” Colene said. “Just focus on something flammable, and try to light it.”

Nona looked around, evidently somewhat at a loss. Darius saw the chopped remnant of their boat. “Try that,” he suggested, pointing. “It’s wood.”

“Yeah, try that,” Colene agreed, smiling.

Nona squinted at the boat. Suddenly there was a fireball, and sparks flew out. In a moment Darius saw that the boat had become a bonfire.

He looked at Nona, who stood openmouthed. “I was joking,” he said, after forcing his own mouth closed.

“So was I,” Colene said.

“I—I knew that,” Nona said. “I didn’t think—the dry tinder—a big wet boat—I just made a huge and futile effort, only—”

“Only it wasn’t futile,” Colene finished. “You figured that even if you could do the magic, it would be just a little-bitty spark.”

“Yes.”

They stood and watched the boat burning, awed.

“I hope you never get angry at me,” Darius murmured.

“Oh, I would never—” Nona said, horrified.

“He’s teasing you,” Colene said. “But I guess we don’t have to worry about carrying fire.” She turned to Nona. “But maybe you should see if you can tone it down a little, because if we needed a candle lit, and you made a fireball—”

Darius had to laugh. But Colene was right; Nona’s magical pyrotechnics could be dangerous. He gathered some sticks, chips, and dry grass, fashioned a small setting, and showed it to Nona.

Nona squinted. Nothing happened. Then, after a moment, there was a faint curl of smoke. Then a little flame appeared. She had it under control.

“So we’ll sleep right here,” Colene decided. Then she did a double take. “Hey! We’re communicating again! Seqiro’s recovered.”

“In a small radius,” Darius said. “He still lacks the strength for more than that.”

Colene went over to hug the horse. “Don’t strain yourself, hoof-foot,” she said. “We can get along without you for a while.” Then she said something else, but it was indecipherable: the horse had taken her at her word, and was resting.

They foraged for fruits and nuts, which were plentiful, and leveled a section of the shore so that Burgess could move comfortably. Nona got a long branch and used it to knock down more fruits, which she offered to Burgess and Seqiro. Darius dug a shallow trench around their camping site, and piled branches in it for Nona to ignite, once they settled down for the night. With this ring of fire, they should not need much else for protection. Nevertheless he intended to keep watch, if no one else did. The business of the crab had satisfied him that this world was not to be trusted.

When night came, the others did sleep, using a tent made from material Nona expanded for the purpose: more handkerchief laced with leaves. But later Colene roused herself, came to him, kissed him, and indicated their tent: it was his turn to sleep. He knew she would stay alert, because she understood the danger as well as he did. He went to the tent and flopped down gratefully beside Nona.

He woke later, to find the figure touching him. In fact, she was kissing him. What was this? “No, Nona!” he protested.

He was answered by a laugh. Then he realized that it was Colene, who had finished her turn and taken Nona’s place in the tent. Embarrassed, he gave her arm a squeeze, and returned to sleep.

But later yet he discovered himself between two human figures. Both women were there. Then who was keeping watch? Alarmed, he crawled out—and saw Burgess floating along his path. The floater was taking his turn.

When dawn came, Burgess had settled back, air quiescent, eye stalks retracted. But Seqiro was pacing the region. My fatigue of the mind has recovered, he thought to Darius.

That was good. They were now reasonably rested, and back to strength, and could continue. As he understood it, they would have to survive in this Mode for several days, to give the mind predator time to forget about Colene. Then they would have to return to the anchor point and cross. With fortune, the hive floaters would also have forgotten about them by then.

Meanwhile, during their enforced stay in this Mode they had gotten to know Burgess, and Nona had discovered a new ability, fire. They could have gotten by without it, because of the matches, but what she could do was better and could well be useful in an emergency. Since the Virtual Mode could be dangerous, this was good.

They foraged for more food and took care of personal incidentals, then got together to decide on their course. Burgess had no idea of the landscape or animal life here; no member of his hive had penetrated even this far, so there was no currency on it.

“Let me get this straight,” Darius said. “Your kind, the floaters, gather together in tribes called hives, and you constantly exchange information through your contact points, so that every member of the hive knows what every other member does. So if any member of your hive had ever been in this wilderness, and lived to rejoin the hive, you would know it?”

Burgess signaled agreement. With Seqiro back on duty, increasingly able to fathom Burgess’ thoughts, there was hardly any confusion now. The floaters were creatures of currency: they had a need always to be current on hive knowledge, and suffered if they lost currency. That was why Burgess had invoked the Virtual Mode. He had to find another hive with which to be current. They were the weirdest kind of hive he could have imagined, had he been a creature of imagination, but he could relate.

“So no other floaters will follow us here, but you have no good information for us,” Darius concluded.

That was true. Since Burgess could travel here only with difficulty, he was a liability to the party.

“That’s not true,” Colene said. “Burgess knows a lot about this world. We aren’t going to be in the wilderness forever, and the moment we get out of it, he’s going to know what we need to know. We’re not dumping him.”

“That was not the nature of my thought,” Darius said hastily. “If Burgess doesn’t know anything about the inner wilderness, then neither do any of the hivers. They won’t know whether we’re alive or dead, or deep inside or just at the edge of the region. So we don’t have to go far. In fact, we don’t have to go anywhere, now that we’ve found relatively safe spot to camp, here.”

“Hey, that’s right!” Colene agreed. “We can dig in and be comfortable.”

Nona was gazing at the sky. “Do you know the flying creatures, Burgess?” she asked.

Burgess oriented his eyes. Yes. Those were predatory creatures that needed to be fended off. He floated to a sandy patch and lowered his intrunk, ready to send a blast of sand up.

“They look like birds, from here,” Colene remarked.

They were not birds. Burgess had no concept of birds, because they were vertebrates, none of which existed here. Neither were these insects. They were of another phylum. They were dangerous, and it would be necessary for the others to hide from them.

“From little birds?” Colene asked incredulously.

But the growing picture Burgess was sending made her turn quickly serious. The most descriptive term was shears: they had mouths which sliced or cut the flesh of their prey, swiftly. They tended to attack in swarms, so that it was hard to defend against them all, and flesh was usually lost.

“We had better stop them from touching us,” Darius said, as the swarm of shears loomed closer. “Nona, if you can grow some shield material—”

Nona caught up a chip of wood and started expanding it. Darius himself went for his sword, then reconsidered; against a flying swarm it would be almost ineffective. Instead he donned heavy gloves, and Colene did the same. Then they put on heavy jackets from their supplies, and took one to Nona.

The shears did not give them much time. Several of the creatures swooped down, making a peculiar buzzing sound. “What kind of wings do they have?” Colene demanded.

Burgess provided a picture: two paddlelike projections, which angled into the air, moving in opposite directions. They were like propellers, except that each had only one extension, sweeping in almost a full circle clockwise, then counterclockwise, so swiftly that the pair of them blurred into fuzziness.

One came straight at Darius. He batted it away with one fist—and felt a flare of pain. His glove had a gash, and blood was welling from the side of his hand. The creature itself spun to the side and then zoomed on away.

Another came at Seqiro. It smacked into the frame of Colene’s bicycle, which was one of the many things tied to the horse’s harness, and dropped to the ground, stunned.

The third went for Burgess—who fired a small rock at it, and a blast of sand. The rock missed, but the sand bathed it, and the shear fled.

Colene pounced on the fallen creature, pinning it to the ground with a forked stick. Now they could see it clearly. The shear was about the size of a robin, but there the resemblance ended. It had small overlapping scales which flared at the back to serve as a rudder, the two propeller-paddles toward the front, and a head consisting of several recessed, armored eyes and the scissor beak. Each blade of that beak was knife-sharp, and stout muscles around it suggested the power of its shearing action. Taken as a whole, it was an odd and ugly thing.

But more were coming. “Shield me, Nona!” Colene cried, still pinning the fallen creature. Nona brought her expanded chip and held it before the two of them.

Darius, seeing that his hand injury wasn’t serious, still recognized that gloves alone were not sufficient. But he lacked a shield. So he scrambled for stones and sand, scraping them into the range of Burgess’ trunk. “I’ll try to keep you supplied; you shoot them down,” he told the floater.

This time a larger swarm of shears came down. Several banged off Nona’s growing shield and spun away. Several more tried for Seqiro, and there was a mental flash of pain as one scored on the horse’s flank. But at the moment Darius had to focus on the ones coming at Burgess and himself.

There were about five of them, each a buzzing blip looming rapidly closer. Their motions were erratic, as their alternate paddle strokes jerked them around in an irregular spiral flight pattern. That made them almost impossible to shoot down at a distance. But a scattershot approach might do it. “Sand,” he told Burgess, touching a contact point. “Fire a wall of sand at them.” He concentrated his scooping on that, getting just as much sand into the floater as he could.

Burgess obliged. He blew out a spreading jet of sand, moving it around so that a fair-sized region between them and the shears became a cloud of it. The shears sheered away from it, perhaps having had prior experience with this tactic. Probably it was what a defensive contingent of hivers used. There was security in number, certainly!

But then they veered back in, from the sides. Darius grabbed at the bodies, trying to catch them from behind, but his reactions were too slow. Then he got smart and grabbed at where they were heading, which was Burgess’ eye stalks. This time he managed to catch one. He threw it down and stamped on it as he grabbed for another.

Then the swarm was gone, and the party was left to tend its injuries. Darius went to see what he could do for Seqiro and himself. The horse’s gouge was painful but not serious, as was his own; salve and bandages helped both.

Meanwhile Colene and Nona were busy. “Here’s your next familiar,” Colene said. “Tame it, and we’ll have a flying spy.”

“That’s wonderful!” Nona agreed.

But more clouds of shears were appearing in the distance. “This place is too exposed,” Darius said. “We have to get some natural cover.”

Colene looked up, seeing the threat. “That’s for sure! At least we can get in among the trees.”

Hurriedly they extended Burgess’ path so that it went into the forest. They found a place under a spreading tree, so that there was a network of branches and leaves walling off the sky. The trunk served as a backstop, so that they could cluster around it, having only one direction to defend. Darius took the wood shield Nona had grown; Nona was busy taming the shear, which she now held in her hand. It no longer looked so ugly, now that it was going to be their ally.

The shears did attack again, but now they had to come in along Burgess’ path, and Burgess was able to shoot them down with stones. They couldn’t stray from that narrow way without running afoul of the tree branches. Soon they gave it up.

“I guess now we know why we can’t camp on the shore,” Colene said regretfully. “If we try to hide from the shears in the water, Anomaly will get us, and if we don’t, we’ll get sliced up.”

“They do not like the forest,” Nona agreed. “I am receiving that from this one’s mind.”

“Oops—does that mean it won’t fly for you in the forest?” Colene asked.

“No, as my familiar it will do what I wish, and feel no fear. But when I release it, it will flee the forest.”

“Then let’s have it explore nearby, so we can find the best place for our camp.”

Soon Nona did just that. The shear flew up from her hand and navigated between the trunks of the trees, flying low. Then it angled up into the sky, so that it could see over the forest.

The creature’s impressions came to Nona, because of her magic, and Nona’s impressions came to the rest of them, because of Seqiro’s telepathy. Thus Darius was able to close his eyes and see the world through the beady eyes of the shear. It was an interesting experience.

He (Darius) seemed to be flying just over the trees, feeling the comforting beat of his props. He saw the region where the lake cut through the forest, and the region where a slope led up to a higher level. He followed that slope, and saw that above it was a mesa: a flat and almost treeless expanse, covered by short grass.

“Say, I think that’s our camping site!” Colene exclaimed. “If the shears don’t go there.”

“They don’t,” Nona agreed. “Because there’s no game there. At least, not now.”

Nona focused, and the others did with her. A picture of something huge and serpentine formed. But it was not a serpent. It was something that slid across the plain and ate the grass. It was armored on top, so that the shears were unable to cut much flesh. Once the grass was gone, the grazer slid off the mesa and moved to another mesa. In the course of a season the grass grew back, and then a grazer would come again. Part of this Darius worked out for himself, as the shear did not think in this manner. It merely had an impression of the big grazer, and of absence of grass.

“That should be a pretty safe place,” Colene said. “And ideal for Burgess, because it’s flat and firm.”

“But mere’s nothing to eat there,” Darius pointed out. “Nothing to drink.”

“Nona can magnify a fruit, and a cup of water.”

They hadn’t occurred to him. “You can do this, Nona?”

“I suppose I can,” Nona agreed, surprised. “I would not try it with living things, but perhaps a fruit would work.”

“So all we have to do is get up there. That’s apt to be a problem for Burgess, because he doesn’t float well on a tilt.”

Darius considered the practical aspects. The mesa did seem to be a good place. How could they make a path Burgess could travel, if it had to be almost level? Then he had a better notion. “A sledge,” he said. “Seqiro could haul a sledge with Burgess on it.”

“Say, yes!” Colene agreed so enthusiastically that Darius had a suspicion that she had planted that notion in his mind. She seemed to want him to be the leader, and when he faltered, she nudged him with ideas. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but this was not the time to protest.

They went to work making the sledge. This was easier than it might have been; Darius simply carved Nona’s shield chip of wood into a platform with two runners below and a surrounding ridge above, and then she expanded it magically until it was large enough to support Burgess. Meanwhile Colene explored to find the best route for the sledge, accompanied by Seqiro, who kept a mental lookout for any possible predators. There were, indeed, no big crabs here, which was a relief. In due course they had a route marked to the slope; that was about as far as seemed feasible for this day.

They dug a shallow pit into the slope, and shored that with branches to make their shelter. They made a fire, and arranged it to burn low in a shallow ditch half circling the shelter, so that it would protect Burgess and Seqiro too. They found a fruit, and Nona magnified it so that it would serve them all for the evening meal. But that wasn’t successful: the fruit expanded its fibers and cells too, so that it resembled a magnified image, and did not taste good.

With wood it didn’t matter, because they didn’t care if it became coarser, so long as it was solid and strong. With metal it didn’t matter, for the same reason. But with food it did. They had encountered a limit to Nona’s magic. So they had to borrow from their carried supplies, this once. However, Seqiro found that he could tolerate his grain expanded to double size, and that did seem to be nutritive, so at least the magic could extend that type of food. Burgess, also, was relatively adaptable; since he sucked in and ground up his food anyway, a coarseness was not much of a problem. So he consumed the expanded fruit. Also, the shear was not choosy, and would eat fruit as well as a blob of expanded blood Nona made from the sodden bandage she changed on Seqiro. The shear, now tame, was satisfied to clamp its beak on the pole supporting the top of the tent and hang there, sleeping; it needed no feet. That was just as well, since it had none.

Again they took turns walking guard. Darius was first. He made sure the fire was continuous, if low; the smoke helped drive off the nocturnal bugs. He fashioned a route that passed the dug-in tent, Seqiro asleep on his feet, and Burgess, settled on the ground at the end of his path. There was a slight susurration from Burgess; he still pumped air, in order to breathe with his nether gills, but not enough to make him float. His eye stalks were retracted, but the light-sensitive patches around his rim remained open.

Darius was surprised at how readily he had come to accept the alien structure of the floater as routine. Probably it was because of the connection between minds. That was not operative now, because Seqiro was asleep, but in the day Burgess’ mind was part of their network.

Actually the floater’s mind was being defined in terms of the human mind, in much the way as was the horse’s mind, because Burgess did not have intelligence of his own. He had tremendous storage capacity, remembering virtually all his own experience and that of all other floaters in the hive, but he did not normally reason things out for himself. When a human mind reasoned something out, while being connected to Burgess’ mind, then it seemed as if the floater were thinking similarly, but that was illusion. That made Burgess more compatible than he might have been otherwise, because though his nature was alien, his thought patterns were becoming human, learned from the human minds. It was like one of the computers in Colene’s thoughts: programmable.

Colene—and there was another matter to be thought out, now that the others were asleep and his thoughts were private. He loved her, foolishly perhaps, but firmly. He wanted to marry her, and could not. Because she was a creature of depression, while he required a creature of joy. This had to do with the nature of his duty as Cyng of Hlahtar, in his home Mode. He had to draw from his wife all the joy she possessed, and multiply it, and send it out to all those in the vicinity. That spread joy to everyone, and made life worthwhile despite its often menial nature. His wife, too, would get her joy back—but it was never quite as much as it had been at the start. So with each repetition, at each new community, her joy was further depleted, until it was too low to be of value. Then he had to divorce her and marry another woman, so as to start the process over. For this reason, the Cyngs of Hlahtar seldom married for love. Instead they married for joy, in an un-romantic sense: the joy they took from their wives. They seldom bothered to have sex with their wives; that was reserved for their romantic interests, their bed maidens.

Darius had hoped to merge marriage and love by finding a maiden he could love who was filled with joy. So much joy that he could never deplete it. This was not a matter of feeling good, but of having a certain indefatigable power of joy. This simply would not work, with Colene; he could draw only dolor from her. The irony was that in the course of his quest for Colene, he had found a woman who would make the ideal wife. That was Prima, whose powers of multiplication of emotion were equivalent to his own. He could marry her, and draw from her without ever depleting her. She was a generation older than he, and not physically attractive to him, but that didn’t matter—if he went the normal course, and married her for her power of joy.

The trouble was that he wanted to marry Colene. This was a foolish desire, and he knew it, but that was the way it was. He could love her, but he couldn’t marry her. She understood this, and accepted it, now. But he didn’t.

A further irony was that she was too young for sex, according to the dictate of her culture. So the other part of his potential relationship with her was in a null state, too. He could neither marry her nor take her for a mistress. Yet he loved her.

When their journey was complete, and they reached his home Mode, what would happen? He would have to marry Prima, but who would he have in his bed? Colene was fiercely jealous of any sexual expression he might have with any woman other than herself. This put him in an awkward position, since the standards of his own culture differed. He wanted her to be happy, but she would not be even remotely happy if she were neither his wife nor his mistress.

It seemed to be an insoluble problem. Maybe they would be better off if they did not reach his home Mode soon. Yet that, too, was problematical. He wasn’t sure how long he could resist her blandishments. She wanted to seduce him, and her attempts were both subtle and unsubtle, and the plain fact was that he found her little body enormously appealing. She thought that her lack of breasts the size of Nona’s made her inferior, but the truth was that he liked women whatever way they came, and could derive as much pleasure from a slender one as from a voluptuous one. Attitude really made a greater difference than body, and Colene’s attitude was the height and depth of intrigue. So it was not safe for him to remain with her too long in the present manner. They had to complete their journey and get off the Virtual Mode.

Darius paused. Had he heard something? There did not seem to be anything in the forest; their smoldering fire seemed to be an effective deterrent. It probably wouldn’t stop a big crab, but that wasn’t the problem. Suppose something came that wasn’t afraid of fire?

Yet the sound didn’t seem to be from the depths of the forest. It seemed to be close, within the fire enclosure. It was also too faint to hear. Was it merely the embers settling?

Darius got down and put his ear to the ground. Now he heard it more clearly: click-click, click-click. From within the ground. What could it be?

He scuffed the dirt with a foot, making a shallow excavation. He uncovered something. He took a stick, touched it to the nearest fire, and brought the crude torch across to illuminate the spot.

Now he saw thin projections rising from the scraped earth. He relaxed, relieved. Worms! These were little worms coming up to forage at night. They clicked as they moved. Did they have jointed shells?

He reached down to touch one. But as his hand approached the worm, it whipped to the side, its pointed end stabbing into his finger. Pain flared.

He jerked his hand away. But now the worm came with it, the head still burrowing into his finger. He had to grab its body with his other hand and yank it out—and that hurt again, because its head was barbed. The thing was a bloodsucker!

He dropped it on the ground and stomped it. Then he stomped the other heads showing. He put his finger in his mouth, trying to stop the pain, but it kept hurting and bleeding. The little monster must have injected something to stop the blood from coagulating.

Then he realized what this meant to those who were sleeping. The worms would come up under them, burrow through their clothes, and—

He ran for the tent. “Wake! Wake!” he cried, reaching in to grab an ankle. It turned out to be Nona’s; her shapely leg lifted as she sat up. “Get on your feet,” he said urgently. “Quickly!”

In a moment both women were standing beside him. “Worms,” he exclaimed. “Bloodsuckers. Coming up through the ground. One stabbed me on the finger, and it won’t stop bleeding.” He showed his finger, which indeed was still leaking blood. He supplemented this with a mental picture of his experience.

Both women were staring blankly at him. Then he realized that the horse remained asleep; there was no translation. Colene could do a little, when she tried, but she wasn’t trying at the moment.

Actually Seqiro could be at risk too, and maybe Burgess. He walked to the horse and touched him on the shoulder. “Wake,” he said. “We have trouble.”

Then the minds of the others tuned in. Darius quickly rehearsed the matter for them all.

In a moment Colene had a torch and was looking inside the tent. “Ugh!” she exclaimed. “They’re coming up! Some are already in the bedding.”

“Now we know why other creatures aren’t sleeping here,” Nona remarked. “Those bloodsucker worms must be all through this forest.”

“But they weren’t by the shore,” Colene reminded her.

“Maybe there’s too much water there,” Darius offered. “Waterlogged soil drowns them out.” But of course the shears ranged there, by day.

“Will they be able to get through your hooves, Seqiro?” Colene inquired.

Three are trying, so far without success, the horse responded.

“What about you, Burgess?” she asked.

Burgess rested on the hard rim of his canopy, with none of his softer parts in contact with the ground; the worms could not get at him.

“And I guess they can’t get through our boots, either,” Colene concluded. “So we’re safe as long as we stay on our feet. What delight.”

“We can fashion an elevated bed,” Darius said.

“Say, yes! Because by the look of it, the worms can’t climb or jump; they just bore up through the sod and into any flesh that’s there. So we can balk them. Still, I’d rather be out of here. The forest has too many ugly surprises.”

Darius was in hearty agreement. He had felt safer on the Virtual Mode, despite its myriad traps.

Nona expanded the wooden sledge, until it was large enough for all three of them to lie on. “You take it now, with Nona,” Colene said to Darius. “I’m wide awake anyway.”

She kept putting him with Nona. He knew why: because it was Colene’s nature to take suicidal risks. He wished he could reverse that, and make her become a vessel of joy. But, with the worst irony yet, he feared she would then lose her fascination for him. He seemed to have as much of a destructive impulse as she did, when he related to her.

He climbed onto the sledge beside Nona and closed his eyes. Nona, appropriately, kept her thoughts blanked. It was an ability she had been practicing. Actually it was one they should all practice because it was better to have control than lack of control. So he concentrated on that. Nothing against you, Seqiro, he thought to the horse. I just want to know how.

IN the morning he found Colene beside him, cuddling close. She was asleep; he could tell, because Nona’s awake thoughts came to him, while Colene’s were of scattered bits of dreams. Impulsively he lifted his head and kissed her on her sleeping mouth. Somehow they would work things out. They had to.

She woke. “Hey, did you kiss me?” she demanded.

“I confess I did. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Can’t think of any way I’d rather be waked.” She lifted her head and kissed him back, hard.

They got through their morning routines, and got to work on the path up the slope. By noon they had something suitable. Then Nona shrank the sledge down to its prior size, and they put Burgess on it. Just to be sure he stayed put, they passed a cord up over his canopy, tying him down.

Darius expected difficulty, but it was surprisingly straightforward. Seqiro was a very large, powerful horse, eighteen hands, which meant that his shoulder was as high as the top of Darius’ head. When he set out to pull, he hauled the sledge and its burden up as if it were inconsequential. Before long they made it to the mesa. Darius hoped this would turn out to be a safe retreat for them.

And so it turned out to be. The predator worms evidently couldn’t get through the rock underlying the surface, and there were no creatures there. It was a vacant plain, as if just waiting for them to use it.

Nevertheless, they made a camp resembling a small fort, with an earthen rampart around it, and a fire trench. They dug down deep, looking for worm holes, just to be sure, then set the expanded sledge in place. None of them cared to take any further chances.

Nona expanded some water, and this at least turned out to be potable. Perhaps that was because it lacked any fibrous structure. Obviously the mass of an expanded object increased because it weighed more; it was just that if it had a rigid structure, it maintained it. That suggested that it was the internal structure of food that caused the problem, rather than the substance itself.

Their night was uneventful, though they kept guard as before. There were no worms, no flying predators, and no land-crawling monsters. Nona’s tame shear explored the mesa and the slopes around it, spying nothing. They foraged for fruit and nuts by making excursions down the path. They agreed that no one should go below alone, so they went as pairs selected from among Seqiro and the three human folk. Burgess could float freely across the mesa, but could not get off it by himself. Desiring to contribute sufficiently to the hive, he offered to do all of the night guarding, so that the others could sleep. But floaters could not move with confidence in darkness. They solved that problem by making several limited fires ringing the edge of the mesa; when Burgess knew it was level and safe within that broad circle of blazes, he was able to cope. If any monster came up on the mesa, he would be able to see its silhouette against one of the fires.

They remained for several days, getting thoroughly rested. Communication with Burgess improved, until problems were infrequent. Burgess, like Seqiro, required the contact of a human mind, in order to think like a human being. Unlike Seqiro, he also needed to be touched on a contact point, to establish mind contact. The horse and the floater together had no mental rapport; there had to be a human touching Burgess, who then brought the floater into the telepathic environment. Once they had worked out the exact nature of the limits, it became easy enough to maintain contact. Since it was the floater’s nature to constantly exchange information with each other person he encountered, for mutual updating, the three humans simply put their hands on his contact points, rather like the custom of shaking hands in Colene’s Earth Mode. Sometimes they all joined him, so that there were multiple contacts. It was possible for each of the three humans to communicate with him without Seqiro’s telepathy, but this was more limited, and of three different types. Colene did it with her own limited telepathy. Nona did it by relating to him as a familiar. Darius did it by doing a limited drawing and return of joy. Burgess could even serve as a partial mental linkage between humans when the horse was asleep. So their time on the mesa was well spent, in this respect. Now they could relate well to each other, and that could be important when they encountered some problem and had to react swiftly and with coordination.

The question was, when should they return to the Virtual Mode? They had no way of telling in advance whether the mind predator remained lurking, but judged that it should have given up by this time. They had less concern about the hivers by the Mode anchor: they did not understand its nature well, and after a few days had stopped watching it. Nona had learned this by sending the shear there to spy. However, the moment their party returned to the main plain and headed for the anchor, the hivers would be alerted and would try to intercept them. This was no good; they didn’t need Burgess’ warning to advise them that they would get stoned to death in short order.

The answer, they agreed, was to go to the anchor at night, when the hivers would be sleeping within their ramparts. But that had its own problems, because of the terrain and the nocturnal predators. They wouldn’t be able to use fire, because that would alert the hivers, who might then come out; Burgess remembered examples of hive action at night, when there was a threat. Floaters did not like to travel at night, but could do so in familiar territory. How, then, could the party make a quiet, safe transit at night? They held several communal sessions, the three humans holding on to Burgess’ contact points while also being in telepathic communication. As a linked group, with some practice, they became a fairly powerful hive mind themselves. They decided on two things: to move by day to the edge of the wilderness closest to the anchor place, so as to have a relatively short journey the rest of the way by night; and to try to capture a night creature for Nona to tame, who could help them see in the darkness. That combination should enable them to reach the anchor safely.

But what night creature could they catch? Burgess had little information on that, because night predators were things of mystery and horror to hivers, to be kept constantly at bay. Some were creatures of the ground, some of water, and some of air. Other predators quickly hauled away the bodies of those brought down by stones, so that there was nothing to examine in the morning. Of one thing Burgess was sure, however: there were quite a number of creatures of the night. More than there were by day, perhaps because the hivers had eliminated most of the serious day predators of the plain. So they would have to have good information before they made that final trek for the anchor.

The trouble was, they couldn’t decide the kind of night creature they could catch, because of their ignorance. It was likely to be dangerous to go hunting for one.

Then Colene had one of her bright notions. “Armor!” she exclaimed. “We can put on armor, so nothing can get at us. No predators, no sand, no stones. Then we won’t have to worry what’s out there.”

“Where would we get armor?” Darius inquired, amused.

“We’ll make it, silly! Out of wood.”

He shook his head. “That could be a great deal of work.”

“Not if we do it small, and have Nona expand it to fit.”

He stopped being amused. She was right: they could be armored. If the panels were solid enough, they would be proof against the stones the hivers could hurl.

“In fact,” Nona suggested, “we might even make an armored wagon, with wheels, for the plain.”

“Wheels!” Colene exclaimed, thrilled. “Big ones, so it can’t get bogged down in the dirt. Seqiro can pull it. He’ll have armor too, of course. Then we can travel there by day.”

Burgess demurred. The hivers would not know what was happening, but they could hurl so many rocks and pile so much sand that it would be impossible to get through.

“At night, then,” Colene said. “An armored wagon at night, to stop the predators without stirring up the hivers.”

They discussed it, and concluded that it was worthwhile. Darius started carving solid wood chips for the protection of arms, legs, and torso, while Colene set about designing panels for a wagon that could be assembled to make a solid container at the edge of the plain. Because they would not be able to fit that wagon through the forest full-sized, and it wouldn’t be much use undersized. With panels, they could use the wheels and base of a reduced-size wagon to carry full-sized panels, then have to enlarge only that base when they got there. Efficiency was the keynote; once they started moving, they didn’t want to delay.

Nona enlarged Darius’ body-armor sections, and he did some additional carving. They used cord enlarged from thread to tie them to his body. When he stood in his full armor, Colene looked at him and laughed. “You look like the Tin Woodman of Oz!” she exclaimed.

“The what?”

“It’s a fantasy story,” she said, making a mental picture. “Never mind. I guess you’re more like a wooden tinman, anyway. I pity the poor monster who tries to eat you!”

“I hope to be too tough a morsel for a monster to swallow, in this armor,” he agreed. But he realized that he must look strange indeed. The curved wooden sections covered his calves, his thighs, his torso, his forearms, his upper arms, and projected up behind his head. There were no joints; the sections simply didn’t connect directly with each other. But they overlapped enough so that no part of him was badly exposed. The wood was not unduly heavy, but he would be glad when he no longer had to wear such equipment.

They agreed that Darius and Seqiro would have armor, while the others rode in the wagon. Even Burgess, who could travel well on the plain but would be exposed. Also, if he were hidden in the wagon, the hivers might not realize he was there, and wouldn’t pay much attention.

Darius carved miniature panels for Seqiro, which Nona expanded. There was a problem, since the horse was already covered with bags and items attached to his harness. They decided to cover every section not already protected to some degree. So Seqiro got neck panels and head protection. He preferred to leave his legs exposed, because armor would interfere with his walking.

Meanwhile Colene completed her wagon design, and demonstrated how the little panels had projections which poked through holes around the edge of the base so that they would be firm. The roof panel had holes which held the upper projections, so that it too was firm. Of course the wagon was larger, now, but the panels would be expanded to fit it.

The wagon itself had four fairly nice wooden wheels on wooden axles lubricated by grease expanded from a drop they had in the supplies. It was crude, but it should work for the two hours or so required. Colene was pleased with what she called her technology, and Darius was pleased too.

They set a day for their travel, when everything was prepared. They started at dawn, hoping to retrace their path through the forest, cross the river, and get past the crab section without stopping, in one day. After all, the way was familiar, and the path had been prepared. The sledge had become the base for the wagon, but still served to carry Burgess.

They started backwards, because the wagon had no brakes. Seqiro was harnessed to it, and he then backed it over the edge of the mesa and strained to prevent it from drawing him down after it. Darius, in his armor, stood at the horse’s head, watching the wagon and track closely, so that the horse could draw both the picture and the best way to react from his mind. Colene and Nona stood at either side of the path, holding poles which they used to block the progress of the wheels. It was a clumsy process, but they were well coordinated by the mental linkage and did manage to get the wagon down the slope without mishap.

Then Darius led Seqiro around a circle they had prepared, and they got moving forward. Their path led between escarpments at the base of the mesa, before bearing away toward the river.

“Okay, we’re ready to move,” Colene said. “But we’d better check for bogies. Anything to worry about, horseface?”

There is a predator near, Seqiro thought as he checked for minds. His concentration on the tricky descent had distracted him from this check before.

“Where?” Colene asked.

On the path ahead.

“Uh-oh. We’ll have to scare it out of there, because we need that path,”

“I will send the shear,” Nona said. The shear launched from her shoulder and flew in its winding way down the path.

Then, abruptly, there was a thought of alarm. It was followed almost immediately by a flare of pain. Then nothing.

“Something killed my familiar!” Nona cried, falling back against a tree. Darius, connected to the shear’s mind through her mind and Seqiro’s, was already aware of that. Death had come with stunning suddenness.

This was serious. The shear, though tamed, remained a vicious customer when encountering others, and was more than competent to avoid what it couldn’t handle. What could have happened?

“I don’t like this,” Colene said. “You have any idea, airfoot?”

Airfoot? But Burgess, like Seqiro, seemed to like her nicknames. However, he had no idea what the shear could have encountered.

“We shall have to go look ourselves,” Nona said.

Darius was already marching ahead, down the path toward the escarpments. He carried a spear and had the axe strapped to his back. He knew that if he had to fight, Seqiro would enable him to do so with devastating efficiency.

As he rounded a turn to where he could see between the escarpments, he spied something odd. It seemed to be a mass of legs and tentacles, unlike anything he had seen on this world before. He tried to form enough of a mental picture so that the others could make sense of it, but there was a patch of vapor in the vicinity that interfered with vision.

Something struck Darius on an armored leg. Before he could react, his leg was yanked out from under him. He was dragged rapidly toward the thing on the path, sliding along his back. The axe was ripped away, and his spear caught against a tree and was yanked from his hand.

Then he was on his back amidst the mass of tentacles, and they were clamping on his armor. He was several feet above the ground. The monster had gotten him!

He struggled, but the tentacles held him down. He couldn’t turn his head to see exactly what it was that held him. But it had to be what had killed the shear.

There was a hissing near his feet. Darius strained to peer down, and saw a tube there. Vapor was issuing from it. As it spread out to envelop him, he started coughing; it was putrid stuff which stung his eyes and nose.

“Hallucigen!” Colene exclaimed. “So that’s how it feeds!”

“Never mind how it feeds!” Darius cried. “Don’t let it catch you!”

“Fire!” Colene exclaimed. “Fire will stop it! Nona—”

There was a burst of flame nearby, and smoke billowed out. Nona had magically ignited the brush near the monster.

The tentacles quivered. Then the monster moved. It backed away from the fire, carrying Darius above it.

“Hit it again, Nona!”

There was another burst of flame, so close that Darius winced from the heat. This time the tentacles convulsed, letting him go. Darius rolled to the ground, landing among flames. He scrambled up and charged away. His armor had protected him from actually getting burned, but he knew that wouldn’t last.

When he was clear, he turned and looked back. Now he saw the monster clearly. It had seven pairs of stiff rodlike legs, and seven tentacles above its long body. Each tentacle had small pincers at the end. Those were what had held him so firmly. But it was the head that appalled him. It had one corrugated snout with hefty toothed pincers at the end that were almost jaws, small eyes circling the snout’s base, and a cruel mouth orifice facing back toward the tentacles.

Suddenly the snout lengthened, the pincers shooting outward. They clamped on Colene’s pole and jerked it out of her hands.

Now he realized what had happened. Those pincers had shot out and caught his leg. Then that snout-tentacle had contracted and hauled him in, dumping him on the monster’s back—where the tentacles had caught him. But why the noxious vapor, and how did the thing eat?

More fire flared. The Hallucigen dropped the pole and backed away again. Then it turned and scrambled fourteen-footedly away.

Colene ran up. “You okay, manface?”

He embraced her as well as he could, considering his armor. “Bruised, singed, battered, choked, humiliated, but otherwise satisfactory, girlface,” he said, kissing her.

“Then let’s get moving before the Hallucigen decides to come back,” she said, turning businesslike.

They resumed their march. As they moved, they pooled their information, with Nona putting a hand on one of Burgess’ contact points so that he could participate. Soon enough they worked out the nature of the thing they had just driven off.

The monster was a long-descended variant of the Cambrian Hallucigen, the creature Colene had thought might be an appendage of a larger creature. It had evolved to come on land, breathe air—Colene had noticed a set of air gills projecting down from the head—and had grown enormously in size. So now it was a monstrous land-predator, as they had discovered. That pincer-snout had snapped the shear from the air and brought it in for swift destruction. Darius, considerably larger, and boxed in by his armor, had been more of a chore, so the monster hadn’t been able to dispatch him before the counterattack commenced.

The Hallucigen’s mouth orifice was in no position to snap at anything in front of the head. But it didn’t need to. Instead the snout whipped the prey onto the back, where it was held, then shoved forward into the orifice. “Like a pencil sharpener,” Colene remarked, clarifying her mystifying reference for them so that her analogy made sense. “You would have been jammed in headfirst, Darius, ground up like hamburger. So maybe it would have taken some time to reach your feet; that was all right, because Hallucigen had you secured. It might simply have eaten another segment each day, until you were gone. Nice system.”

“Very nice,” he agreed wryly. “But why the vapor?”

She had an answer for that too. “It’s digestive, I think. Probably sort of pacifies the prey and softens it up, so the mouth can grind it in better. I mean, why make the meat grinder work harder than it needs to?” She had to clarify her analogy again, but again it was apt.

“It must also drive away other predators,” Nona offered. “So that none will try to take away the meat.”

“Yeah, like a skunk,” Colene agreed. “With the prey held right there, it probably just puts the tenderizer right on it, neat as you please. I’m sure glad I found out how the head works; it was a real mystery. The thing must have stood in a current, so nobody would smell it, and hauled in any creatures drifting in that current. It didn’t need to move fast, because the current would bring prey down to it. It just had to be sure it was secure on its feet. It’s a pretty neat design, really.”

“Neat,” Darius agreed, echoing her colloquialism. “I am just glad that Nona knew how to make fire.”

“I never thought of it,” Nona protested. “Until Colene told me.”

“Actually we might have put a block in its pincers and then beaten it off,” Colene said. “It doesn’t have other offensive weapons. It’s just snatch and hold and eat. But I’m glad it didn’t eat you,” she said to Darius.

He was glad too.

They continued along the path, making good progress. At this rate they would indeed complete their trip in one day. If they didn’t encounter any other ugly surprises.