Soul Pipes

Soul Pipes

By Ray Aldridge

/Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dec2002, Vol. 103 Issue 6/

WE WORKED THE RUINS EVERY day under the brown sun, and every night I wished I were elsewhere. Initially I was bored and resentful, but soon I grew fearful.

It wasn't that our discoveries were so disturbing, at first. When we landed on Graylin IV, the ruins seemed benign, ground down into the innocence of great age, scoured clean by emptiness. Of course, something had killed the colony. But that fatal unpleasantness was long gone, worn away with the walls. Graylin IV was an inhospitable world and the colonists were religious crazies... an infinite variety of unfortunate events might have ended their attempt to sink human roots into alien soil.

Still, as the days passed my uneasiness grew, for no apparent reason. The wasteland where we'd pitched our small camp wasn't haunted in any obvious way by hungry ghosts. Ravening night-monsters weren't stalking the darkness outside the perimeter, so far as I could tell.

All that came later.

A few days after landing I spoke to Irvane about my anxieties. «Do you feel it?» I asked.

«What?» Irvane seemed mesmerized by the screen of an analyzer, which he had focused on a bit of bone embedded in the mossy stonework. Our archaeologist was a large, pale, loose-fleshed man, perpetually scowling but occasionally amusing. He had chosen to adorn himself with a thin line of nappy red fur, spiraling out from the crown of his otherwise naked head. It wrapped twice across his face, eventually disappearing into his collar. I assume the track continued on its course around his protuberant belly. For some reason this cosmetic eccentricity prevented me from taking him seriously, though he was, I understood, a scientist of moderate reputation. I suppose this means that I'm now a very shallow person, which shouldn't surprise anyone.

I suppressed the nervous smile I felt tugging at my mouth. «Have you noticed that there's an odd atmosphere about the place? Something uncomfortable. Not quite right.»

Irvane gave me a dismissive look. «I thought you claimed to have no imagination,» he said.

«That's what concerns me,» I said, but clearly he wasn't paying attention. He turned back to his analyzer and I went to my work, which was not so important to the expedition as his.

Officially I was the expedition's mechanic, but in the early phases of the dig I monitored a mapping mech as it crawled over the site, cataloguing the surface features and developing a deep structural profile. The job didn't demand much of me; it was much like ambling through the park with a docile pet, one that occasionally paused and detonated a small sharp explosion beneath its carapace. I kept the mech supplied with recording media and fuel cells. Twice a day I took abstracts of its findings to Hu Moon, the expedition leader.

She was more attractive and less amusing than Irvane. A slender woman with large yellow eyes, Hu Moon's white skin was tattooed, apparently everywhere, with faint, pale blue contour lines, emphasizing the delicate topography of her body. She wore her long black hair in a thick braid, tipped with tiny glittering fling knives. I found her ornamental, even arousing, and I might have enjoyed seeing more of her handsome terrain, except that her personality was repellent, at least to me. She was both passive and overbearing, as the mood took her, and this inconsistency annoyed me. She regarded me with indifference, except when I was late with the reports.

Her lover, not coincidentally, was the expedition's scribe and general recorder. Dueine was a very young woman of conventional prettiness, with an unmanageable mass of curly blond hair and a pleasantly bland personality. Her talents as a scribe struck me as imperceptible... but of course I am a practiced cynic, a habit of mind that has survived the changes I've undergone. When we hung in space above the dead colony, Dueine described Graylin IV in these terms:

«... it's an ugly world, and one wonders why the colony chose it. Small, dull, cold, and dark, the world inspires no dreams of wealth to be won, homes to be built, dynasties to be founded... at least to this observer. Of course, the colonists were fleeing persecution on their former world, and perhaps this wilderness struck them as a good hiding place. Maybe so, but it's certainly an unpleasant lair. The swampy plains are gray-green, patchy with algae and a few primitive treelike plants. Our preliminary survey shows no animals more evolved than simple insects and sessile invertebrates. What could they have been thinking, to land on so desolate a world? What went wrong? That's what we're here to find out!»

A sour smile pulled at my mouth when I first read this passage. Dueine's prose drew my scorn, of course, but also her ignorance and naiveté. As folk of small vision often do, she describes the whole planet as if it were identical to the colony's site. Graylin IV has icecaps covering a third of its surface, and an equatorial ocean, and even in the temperate regions, where the colony was founded, there are enormous variations in terrain and biota.

She'd left out many other aspects of the planet. The simple fauna present on Graylin IV, for example, had a developmentally truncated quality, with no species lines leading very far up the evolutionary intelligence ladder. Sometimes this indicates a disaster wrought by overreaching sentience, a war that ended the futures of the higher species. But Graylin IV showed no signs of such cataclysmic events, no great craters, no lava dikes from core taps run wild, and no obvious ruins other than the colonial remnants.

I discovered these facts in the ship's knowledge base. A lack of imagination does not always mean a lack of curiosity. In fact, I was sure I'd have made a better scribe than Dueine, though I am untrained in that skill. I really do believe this, in spite of what they say about folk like me. The literal-mindedness that was forced upon me should be no great handicap for a journalist.

I might not have minded fulfilling Dueine's unofficial duties, too, even if Hu Moon's personality grated a bit. Hu Moon's beauty was stylishly eccentric– my favorite kind. Sometimes personalities change when skin touches skin, or hidden depths become apparent. I suppose I told myself this to justify my attraction to the woman.

The remaining full-time member of our group of knowledge seekers was Jang, a weapons master from one of Dilvermoon's Holding Arks and a man everyone treated with respectful caution. He was physically imposing... tall, wide, with dense slabs of muscle under a gray, artificially hardened skin, completely hairless. He had a quiet closed face, his ears were cropped, and his teeth were glittering bands of sawtoothed alloy, so sharp that his tongue and lips were scaled with protective metal. I saw him yawn once when he didn't know I was looking and learned that his mouth could open much wider than any unmodified human's. I could not imagine how foolish or how insane one would have to be to pick a fight with Jang.

Jang seemed uninterested in archaeology, though he would cheerfully work with us whenever he wasn't busy checking his security devices or maintaining his weapons. His real job was to see that we all remained alive and that our ship returned intact. He was paid by our insurer, not by the university financing the dig, and though he behaved with perfect courtesy toward Hu Moon, he was not actually under her orders.

That night Jang sat, as he sometimes did, apart from the others, beside an artificial campfire in his corner of the security compound.

«Jang,» I said, with that insincere joviality people often feign when they approach an obviously dangerous person.

«Leeson,» he responded in his low, unemotional voice. «How are you?»

«Fine, fine,» I said. «Well, not entirely.»

«How so?» Despite his professional detachment, Jang was not unsociable; in fact, he was unfailingly polite to me.

I sat and drew a deep breath. «I don't want to sound foolish, but are you sure we're alone?»

«Reasonably,» said Jang. «Do you have evidence to the contrary?»

I persevered. «We haven't been here long enough for anything to break, so Hu Moon has me running the mapper. Anyway, I have a lot of time to myself, and... well, I feel watched.»

«'Watched,'« Jang repeated, with no trace of impatience.

«Yeah. Well, maybe not 'watched,' you know, with all those spooks-in-the-bushes connotations. I mean, who believes in ghosts? But like something's still here, still paying attention somehow. You don't feel it?»

«Possibly,» he said.

I felt a sudden pleasure, that someone might be taking me seriously. It doesn't happen that often anymore. «What do you mean? Have you seen something?»

He took a long time to reply. «No. And it may be nothing. It's sometimes difficult for me to separate intuition from paranoia. There's a fairly indefinite line there... still, I hope not to cross it.»

«Well,» I said, finally. «I just thought I'd mention it. Just a bad feeling. Probably doesn't mean anything.»

He nodded politely, and I thought I saw in his eyes that graceful pity that the large-hearted and powerful sometimes feel for the crippled.

I retired to my shelter, no angrier than usual.

OVER THE NEXT few days we sank test pits into the colonial strata, and we started finding the occasional interesting object. The colonists had apparently done well enough, for a while. We excavated a number of artifacts manufactured on-world, indicative of a well-preserved technology.

Most of the actual artifacts we found were the ordinary domestic refuse that litters the places where humans have lived... the broken crockery, bits of corroded metal and weathered plastic... the discarded junk of existence. Of course there were cannabis pipes of all sorts, made of a wide range of materials... water pipes, effigy pipes, vaporizers, gravity pipes, and a variety of others.

We also discovered several anachronisms... objects dating from periods long after the colony's death. Hu Moon attributed these to casual visitors; curiosity seekers who might have landed briefly at the site in the many centuries since the colony had failed.

In any place where humans have lived, there will usually be at least a few things worth finding. Some of the pottery was strongly and simply made, vigorous and expressive. Some of the pipes were beautifully carved, and I felt a twinge of envy for the long-departed pipemaker's talent, which reminded me unhappily of the abilities I've lost.

My favorite piece was a low wide bowl, 40 centimeters across. Its perfection of shape and finish indicated it had been formed in a standard molecular replicator. The bowl, of translucent glass, showed an embedded image.., the view from the settlement site, looking east across the gray and umber bogs, the reddish light of the rising sun painting the low sky, the scene rendered in broad, impressionistic strokes. A melodramatic image, of course. My critical faculties have probably suffered the same fate as my imagination, but I still liked it. «A big souvenir ashtray,» I said to Irvane when he found it.

He gave me an evil look. «Shut up, Leeson.»

«Just kidding,» I said. The bowl was strangely beautiful, far more so, to my eyes, than the actual vista we saw every day. I thought about the long-dead people who had eaten from this bowl and 'wondered if they had occasionally felt the same uneasiness with their world that I did.

We found the remains of the colony's central computer, and the oriented crystal stack that comprised its main memory module. This was relatively undamaged and some of us grew cheerful at the thought that we'd be leaving Graylin IV sooner than expected. Irvane's pre-expedition research indicated that they'd had the computer before they became a colony, back when they were still an indentured people on Bonton. As a despised and persecuted minority, they'd had good reason to maintain the privacy of their files, and the stack was encrypted.

Unfortunately the encoding algorithm had been designed in such a way that we could not simply skip to the final days of the colony; we had to decode the log in sequence, since each data unit incorporated the key to the succeeding unit. Irvane set the ship's computer to reconstructing the log, using a brute-force algorithm that yielded only a few months of entries per day. There was no audio, for reasons that Irvane did not bother to explain.

The early entries were fairly dull, concerned with such matters as local terraforming, shelter-building, and the adaptation of crops and livestock to local conditions. Irvane's expert systems pored through the mass of data and chose representative bits for us to consider, which we did every night. At first, watching these records was a painfully tedious duty.

ONE MORNING we found a coldsleep worker dead in the ruins just outside the ship's security perimeter, a man we called Flash because he was so slow. The coldsleep workers are convicts, carried in the ship's stasis chambers just like the other supplies. They don't have names anymore; we give them convenient nicknames. We thaw them out when we need an extra pair of hands and ice them down again when we're done with them. They're a harmless lot, no matter what heinous crimes they committed in their former lives, because they've been brainburned into tranquil docility, with just enough intelligence left to feed themselves and follow simple instructions. The polite term for them is «servitor.» They're cheaper than mechs and require less maintenance. Still, I don't approve of icicle labor. Call me old-fashioned, but slavery is a Bad Thing, even if the slaves are too stupid to understand their condition. Even if they deserve their condition, or worse.

And also, I'm enough like them to feel a degree of uncomfortable brotherhood. Of course, their crimes were worse than mine and so their punishment was much harsher.

Flash had been operating a sifter for Irvane, and he was supposed to have gone back to the ship's hold at day's end. The mystery was not so much that Flash had died, it was that he hadn't returned to the hold. Usually his nerve collar would have been irresistibly persuasive. Sometimes the icicles just forget to come home and wander about in dull bemusement until the collar reminds them and they run screaming back to the ship. We could all see the line of red flesh under Flash's collar, where the collar had damaged the skin.

All five of us stood looking down at Flash's body. He was a very small man, though strong. He'd died kneeling in the loose gravel by the sifter screen, folded over like an old-time Meccaman praying to his god. «Did the collar cook him after he died?» I asked.

«Not unless it malfunctioned,» Jang said. «Supposed to shut down if the prisoner dies.»

I felt vaguely criticized. «I ran every collar through the diagnostic module, before we landed. Part of my job.»

«Strange,» said Jang. «Maybe a stroke, and he couldn't respond to the collar. Icicles have a high rate of cerebral accidents. The brainburning weakens them.»

He touched Flash's body with the toe of his boot and the body toppled sideways. The dead man's face rolled into the light, and we all made our individual sounds of shock and discomfort, except for Jang, who was too self-possessed to react perceptibly. The dead man's eyes were wide with what might have been terror, though I've always thought that describing corpses in such emotional terms is something of an embellishment at best. Most dead people don't seem very happy about their condition. In any case, his lips were pulled back in a toothy fearful grimace, and there was dark brownish blood on his chin from a lacerated lower lip. I saw something white in his hands, which were clasped tightly to his chest.

Irvane, who had made his disinterest in the demise of the icicle obvious, was suddenly galvanized. He knelt beside the corpse and began to pry at the fingers with a delicate little pick.

«Be cautious,» said Jang. «Maybe it wasn't a stroke that killed him.»

«It's an artifact,» said Irvane, oblivious. «Some sort of carved stone, or maybe porcelain.» He succeeded in freeing the thing from the corpse's grip and it rolled loose on the gravel.

I think even Irvane was taken aback by what he saw, because he didn't immediately seize the thing. I wouldn't have touched it either. It had a wizened gargoyle face of polished white stone, with a blackened hole in the top of its head. «It's another pipe,» someone said.

«Yes,» said Irvane. He was looking at the thing's eyes and they were looking at him. Or so it seemed to me. It was as if the thing's eyes, dark and liquid, were moving behind a translucent veil of stone. As if the stone hadn't melted from the eyes completely.

«Don't touch it,» said Jang, suddenly.

Irvane picked it up, his large face creased with annoyance, as if in resentful reaction to the sharp tone used by Jang, who was, after all, a mere hireling like me.

«It's just a clever carving,» he said, and then his face slackened in some small, but tangible way. «Still a little warm. Maybe heat from the body.»

For some reason everyone edged away from him slightly. But after a moment, Jang reached down and touched the corpse in the center of its chest. «Cold,» he said. «He must have died early last night.»

I took another step back. For some reason, all my formless anxiety had condensed and sharpened around the little carving. I had, after all, felt watched. And the thing had eyes.

I'm a very simple person now.

«Autopsy him,» Hu Moon said.

Jang nodded, and the rest of us went off to our various assignments, Irvane clutching the effigy pipe as tightly as Flash had.

Somewhere there's a manual for expedition leaders which includes a chapter entitled: «Acceptable Social Rituals and How to Organize Them.» Hu Moon had instituted a cocktail hour early in the voyage to Graylin IV, and the habit stuck. Every evening before dinner we gathered in the ship for a ration of grog, or whatever social lubricants we preferred, and then we viewed excerpts from the colony log and discussed the day's events.

Oddly enough, as a group we seemed to prefer antique drugs; I suppose this was due to the conservative nature of most academics. Hu Moon was a traditionalist; she took a tot or two of expensive Mundo del Mano rum. Irvane was another traditionalist; he liked to snort a line of organic cocaine, and it made him a little less phlegmatic. Jang smoked cannabis.., so much for the Jaworld claim that cannabis is the drug of choice for the peaceful person. Jang's preference was clearly based on other factors.

Dueine and I were the only puritans in the crew; we usually shared a healthful vegetable juice cocktail, though I added a shot of pepper sauce to mine.

Dueine avoided all recreational drugs. She claimed a constitutional propensity for addictive behavior, though she didn't seem old enough to have acquired that sort of knowledge about herself.

Dueine, with the directness of youth, asked me why I didn't participate in any of the available chemical distractions. I just shrugged and smiled, my usual response to difficult questions... I didn't care to discuss the specifics of my condition with curious children. She asked me again several times, as if her memory expired every day when she got up, and I'd always given her the same non-answer.

But that night, when she asked, I told her a small part of the truth. «Ah,» I said. «Here's the trouble. When I like something, I really like it. Know what I mean?» I leered at her, just to take the curse off this uncharacteristic outburst of semi-honesty.

She recoiled, naturally enough, though she didn't entirely lose her smile. I happened to glance at Hu Moon and saw that she'd fixed me with a cold poisonous glare.

Jang came in, moving in that unnerving soundless way of his, and Hu Moon set her glass aside. «Well? What did you discover?»

«It was a stroke, as we suspected,» he said.

She turned to me. «Leeson? I thought you said you checked the collars.»

Before I could respond, Jang spoke again. «There was nothing wrong with the collar. It cooked him before he died.»

Hu Moon settled back and took up her glass. «So, he was paralyzed, but it took him a while to expire?»

Jang shook his head. «I don't think so. The stroke was sudden and overwhelming. He died almost instantaneously... but after the collar had been cooking him for a long time, or so the data suggest.»

«Strange,» I said. «I wonder what he found so distracting that he could ignore that.»

Hu Moon's glance slid over me, dismissively. «What do you think happened?» she asked Jang.

«Don't know,» he answered. «It's very odd.»

«Anything else?»

Jang paused, as if considering the relevance of his data. «Perhaps. There were faint traces of some sort of fluid on his skin, resembling a mixture of blood and mucus.»

Hu Moon looked annoyed. «Oh for.... What are you saying? He was attacked by a pack of giant carnivorous slugs? The ones we haven't noticed yet?»

Jang responded with a small smile. «Possibly. But the substance, as best I can tell, is a simple non-biological imitation of those substances. It contains no traces of DNA or any other encoded protein. Fake mucus, fake blood.»

A small tense silence ensued. Then Dueine asked a question that seemed to come from no obvious source. «What did you say Flash did? His crime? That got him made into a servitor?»

Jang gave her a level, considering glance. «I didn't say, because I don't know,» he said, finally. «Do you think it matters?»

She shrugged.

«Well,» Jang said. «Here is my recommendation: we should avoid using icicle labor if possible. The controllers seem to be functioning unreliably, and we don't know why.»

Hu Moon nodded. «I'll consider your advice,» she said.

A chime summoned us to the holotank set up in the center of the ship's lounge. We took seats, and Hu Moon sat next to me. The lights lowered and she leaned against me. I might have enjoyed the contact, except that it was obviously not a friendly one. «Leave Dueine alone,» she hissed in my ear. «Can't you see that you make her uncomfortable?»

«Sorry,» I said, not taking her very seriously.

She made a faint spitting noise. «There are a dozen icicles left in the hold. If you can't control your sexual urges, let me know and I'll have one thawed for you. One of the women is quite fetching.»

I sat in the dark with my ears burning and a lump of rage in my throat. I know that I'm less subtle now than other people, but I can still recognize cruelty when it's offered to me.

We watched scenes from the colony's fifth year.

They had been a fairly small group, less than a hundred, but clever enough to understand the problems associated with limited gene pools. Toddlers ran to and fro under the brown sunlight, and none of them looked much like their parents, though they had the dark skin and curly hair of the colonists, the black eyes and everted lips that had survived the centuries since their ancestors left Jaworld. Probably most of the children had been carried aboard as embryos frozen in stasis boxes, but likely some of the youngest came from living wombs. As the colonists had grown more secure in their new home, some of the women had evidently decided to take the time to gestate babies and were visibly pregnant.

The houses were quietly attractive, long low structures built from the gray fossil coral that cropped out here and there, the steep roofs thatched with plasticized marsh reeds. The doors and window frames were painted ultramarine blue, a touch of pure color in an otherwise umber and sepia landscape.

The colonists wore simple utilitarian garments of gray-brown fiber, identical to the universal one-piece shipsuits still in use these many centuries later. I could see, however, that fashion was raising its inconstant head. Some of the women had begun to wear colorful scarves wrapped at the waist. In their hair, in lieu of the flowers which had not evolved on Graylin IV, many wore the shells of fossil molluscs, thin shiny black disks with a faint blueish opalescence, strung like beads on cord dyed the same blue as the doors.

Tonight the ship's computer had chosen to show us scenes from a possibly religious ceremony, one which took place every day at sunset. Anyway, this was Hu Moon's interpretation. I thought it possible that the leaders of the colony had read the same book on expedition socialization as Hu Moon, but I kept this speculation to myself.

The babies were put into their cribs and the adults drifted into a small plaza at the center of the settlement, faces washed and hair combed, wearing looks of mild expectation.

The computer edited out much of the footage, since there's little excitement to be found in a large quiet group of people watching the sun go down. Occasionally the holocamera would move in close, to fill our tank with a single face.

Here was a middle-aged man with thin sharp features, puffing on a hand-rolled cigarette, slanted eyes half-closed. He still wore his hair in the matted ropes that had at times been fashionable on Jaworld, but I noticed that many of the younger colonists had abandoned the style. Once I'd wondered aloud why they hadn't just gone back to Jaworld, when Bonton became too dangerous. Irvane had instructed me in Jaworld history, telling me that the Jaworlders had come to value the depopulation resulting from the notorious Ganja Wars, when so many had died or emigrated from their beautiful world, including the ancestors of the dead colonists. The Jaworlders had instituted strict controls on reproduction and ended immigration. The only visitors they welcomed were tourists, who came, spent their money, and left. They made no exceptions for expatriate groups.

The camera moved to an old woman with bloodshot eyes and a cloud of frizzy white hair, who held a chillum expertly between her big-knuckled fingers, and who released clouds of white smoke into the waning light, laughing silently.

Many of the smokers sat by themselves, but here and there small groups passed fat spliffs from hand to hand. No one spoke.

The camera lingered especially long on a beautiful young woman, with skin as black and polished as the shells she wore in her long, softly waved hair. I supposed that the camera operator had, or hoped for, an intimate connection with her, so lovingly was she framed. The ruddy light of sunset haloed her. She sat apart from the others, smoking from a simple bamboo-stemmed brass pipe, her expression inward and unreadable, even when the camera zoomed in so that her heavy-lidded eyes filled the screen.

«One of the community's pipemakers, Suhaili,» said our computer in its soft artificial voice. «A person of high status, a status derived from her important calling and from substantial personal charisma.»

I could understand that. Across the centuries, she seemed as real to me as any of my companions, and more interesting. Strange to think how long she'd been dead, strange to think that some of the bone chips Irvane had sifted from the site might have belonged to that elegant creature.

I found this a sad thought, too. I had no more urge to socialize, so I left the ship, returned to my own shelter module and tried to sleep.

THE PERIMETER ALARM shrieked, waking me an hour after midnight. I rolled from my cot, groggy and confused, but I remembered to grab the weapon I'd been issued, a short-barreled smartgun that wouldn't fire while pointed at any of the expedition's members, the ship, or at any critical life-support systems. It was the perfect weapon for an untrained person. I hoped the others were similarly armed.

I ran outside. A naked dead woman four meters tall was staggering along the perimeter, screaming in brassy harmony with the alarm. I say she was a dead woman because her enormous belly was ripped open from breastbone to pubis, though nothing but blood had spilled from the wound. In fact, it seemed to me that there was nothing but emptiness inside the woman, and I wondered where she found breath to make those terrible sounds.

Her skin was that horrid blue-gray color that invades corpses, her eyes seemed to look in different directions, her arms hung stiffly at her sides. Her great size somehow emphasized the impossible horror of her existence.

I thought I was hallucinating until the stuttergun atop the security module fired a long burst and cut her into tumbling fragments.

Jang stood beside the module, wearing black monomol armor and equipped with a shoulder-mounted weapon almost as powerful as the stuttergun. He tapped at a wrist-mounted dataslate; evidently he had ordered the stuttergun to fire.

«What...?» I asked.

«No idea,» he said in his soft monotone. I couldn't see his expression behind the mirror visor of his helmet, but I doubted his face would show any of the confusion I felt.

Irvane arrived, clad in a fashionably mauve version of Jang's armor, waving a gun even bigger than Jang's. He resembled a dangerous grape. «What was it?» he asked in a voice full of disbelief and fear; evidently he had seen the thing from his shelter.

Dueine appeared in her doorway, dressed charmingly in a pair of bunny-rabbit bedroom slippers and nothing else, eyes rolling, face white. She seemed to be on the verge of violent nausea, throat working, hands clasped between her pretty breasts. I averted my eyes politely, until Hu Moon shouted for her and she stumbled back into their shelter.

«Get me a sample, Leeson,» Jang said, offering me a specimen case. «If you would be so kind.»

I took the case, though my first impulse was to hand it back. «Sample of what?»

«Its flesh... or whatever it was made out of,» Jang said looking over my shoulder. «Better hurry.»

I twitched around and saw that the chunks of shattered monster were apparently melting into the ground. A disturbing crawling motion accompanied this disappearance. I wasn't enthusiastic, but of course I was the most expendable member of the expedition, except for the icicles. So when Jang briefly switched off the perimeter sensors and waved me across the line, I went... more or less willingly.

I trotted out toward the monster's remaining bits. At closer range, these seemed to be devolving into a myriad of tiny white wormlike forms, which then disappeared writhing into the ground. I knelt beside the largest remaining piece of monster flesh, and activated the case, which snapped shut on the stuff, along with a bit of lichen and soil.

I shook it; it rattled like a stone.

Hu Moon came forth as I returned from the perimeter with my sample. She was somewhat rumpled and smelled of sex. Her manner conveyed suspicious annoyance, as though she blamed us for the event that had disturbed her evening.

«So, what was it?» she asked in a brittle voice. «Jang, this is your area of expertise. What do you know?»

«Almost nothing,» Jang said politely. He took the sample case from me. «Did you get anything?» he asked me.

«I think so,» I said. «You won't believe it, but the stuff, the stuff that wiggled away... it looked like white stone. Wiggly stone.»

«'Wiggly stone'? What next?» Hu Moon was clearly exasperated. «You're not supposed to have any imagination.»

«So I'm told,» I said, looking at my feet.

Jang shook the sample case and it still rattled. I looked up to see him smiling at me with what seemed genuine sympathy. «Sounds like stone, doesn't it?» he said to Hu Moon.

She shook her head. «Tell me what's really going on. First thing in the morning.» She went back to bed and I wondered how she could be so incurious about an event that appeared, to me at least, to defy rationality. If a giant dead woman had indeed marched wailing around our camp, then the universe had gone crazy and nothing could be relied on. I shuddered. How could there be a reassuring explanation for such a thing? Perhaps I felt this way because of my crippled mind, my burned-away imagination, but of course there's no way to know.

Irvane, who had said nothing, turned away from the darkness beyond the perimeter and gave me a look full of uncertainty. «I'm going in,» he said in a voice taut with incipient hysteria. «I intend to sleep late, and without any other bad dreams.»

As he returned to his shelter, he held his oversized gun ready in both hands.

«Leeson,» said Jang. «Thank you for your assistance.»

I nodded, grateful for his kindness. «Well,» I said. «Good night.»

In the morning the sunlight seemed treacherous, something that only hid the darkness. I went out to the site, the mapping robot trundling obediently at my heels. Jang was already there, still armored and armed. He pushed up his visor to greet me.

«Good morning,» he said. Despite the affectless manner in which he spoke, he always managed to give the impression of courteous attention. I suppose even if you are a creature as dangerous as Jang, it's usually better to avoid conflict. It's a puzzle why ordinary humans, so much softer, so much more vulnerable, often fail to behave as sensibly. But of course, I can only speculate in a fairly limited way. I'm certain that my imagination is not entirely destroyed, because how could a person be human without some bit of creative capacity? How could I even wonder about these things, if I were entirely unable to imagine something other than what I see and hear? But so many things puzzle me now. I wonder if I were more certain, before the treatments. It seems to me that I must have been, but I don't know if that was really a good thing.

I set the mapping robot to work in its assigned sector. Jang waited until the robot had begun its pattern, and then he gestured for me to join him under the canopy that protected the sifters and other machinery. I wondered what he could want with me, but I was willing to be distracted from my thoughts. We sat on a bench and I stared out at the site, as if I were greatly interested in the slow careful movements of the robot.

«Leeson,» he said. «Tell me what you saw last night.»

«I saw a dead giant. She walked and screamed. Isn't that what you saw?»

«It was,» he answered. «Everyone else saw her, too. I wanted to ask you because of your special circumstances. If we were all imagining her, I thought it possible that you had seen something else.»

«You're diplomatic,» I said.

He ignored this, but after a moment, he spoke again. «If you will not think me discourteous, I would like to know how you came to be modified.»

«'Modified'?» I said this with unintended bitterness. The loss was still close to the surface, even though in the strictest sense I hadn't been deprived of anything I was still using.

«If you would find it distressing to talk about, then never mind,» said Jang.

«No,» I said. «I don't really mind telling you. Sometimes it helps a bit to whine, and hardly anyone ever asks to hear the whole sordid tale.» I summoned a smile. I suppose it was a weak one.

«I was an artist, though probably not a very good one. But my pictures sold often enough to keep me fed, so I can't complain. Better painters have starved. I've known a few.

«Anyway, I had a bad experience, on Noctile. I loved something that couldn't love me... a story as old as the universe, I guess. When I returned, I felt less satisfaction with my work, though I was never that confident of its value. It got worse; I drugged myself, I used stemstim, I acquired the most beautiful lovers I could find and discarded them at a fairly offensive rate. But I still painted enough to pay my bills, so... no problem.

«Then I had another little adventure, trying to recapture the pleasure I'd once taken in making pictures. The adventure showed me how far from significance my work really was, and I found this difficult to accept. I gave myself over entirely to dissipation. I didn't paint anymore. It was fun for a while, I guess.»

Jang nodded, as if he understood. Which was unlikely, of course, but I gave him credit for good manners. «And then?» he asked.

I shrugged. «The usual story. When I'd sunk deep enough in debt, my creditors had me committed to a rehabilitation clinic. The staff concluded that my troubles stemmed from my drug dependencies, so they cured me.»

«Hence your disability?»

«Yes. The human response to many psychoactive drugs– the ones I liked anyway– is linked to the creative process. If you take away one, you take away the other. Drugs aren't fun anymore. You can take all you like and... nothing.»

«It's not really like brainburning, I understand,» Jang said.

«No, no. There's no physical damage to the brain; I'm not an icicle. I have a nanomonitor in my head, a system of sensors, taggers, and phages. My production of neurochemicals is kept strictly within certain parameters. Only so much serotonin, for example, and each molecule is tagged with an authorized code, so that only my own native neurochemicals are allowed to bind with my receptors.»

I laughed nervously. «There are advantages, I suppose. I'm never too sad or too happy.»

«What does that mean...'too happy'?» Jang's emotions were rarely visible on his face. But I thought I detected a faint edge of amusement in his gaze.

«There's sometimes a thin line between joy and mania.» I spoke sharply, and instantly regretted it. Jang was really my only friend on this empty world.

«Oh, yes,» he said, and I could detect no irritation in his tone. «In fact I've heard that the only difference is that mania lasts longer than joy. And of course I know that those who suffer only from mania often resist treatment.»

I laughed again, this time with genuine pleasure. «There you have it. I'm protected from the excesses of chemical ecstasy, as well as the excesses of artistic inspiration.»

«Your doctors... they weren't concerned that they were taking your livelihood?»

I shrugged. «A civilized society needs its citizens to pay their bills. Much more than it needs yet another mediocre artist. But I suppose they decided it was moot. As I said, I wasn't painting anymore. Anyway, most folks have a lot more imagination than they really need, they say.»

«Is that what they say?» Jang asked with just the faintest hint of skepticism.

«Yes.» I noticed that my fists were clenched. «Yes.» I try never to think too long about that very bad time, oddly memorable, when I was drowning myself in chemical distractions. I suppose I had to stop. And they insisted that my death as an artist was just an unavoidable side effect of my treatment. Though sometimes I think that isn't true, that it was a punishment. Sometimes I think that the «side effect» was developed along with the treatment in order to frighten artists into responsible drug use. We, after all, seem to be the segment of the population most flamboyantly attracted to excessive stimulation.

I'd thought myself brave and clever and fashionably cynical, making jokes about my inability to paint, back when it was only weakness and self-pity that stopped me from working. I suppose I thought it was temporary. Now that my inability is real and permanent, I see what a fool I was.

«This nanomonitor,» Jang asked. «Will it always be with you? Does it ever require adjustment or other maintenance?»

«Occasionally,» I said. «Every six months, standard, I develop a deep yearning to revisit my benefactors. Recalibration time. They tell me that bad things can happen if I somehow avoid this compulsion. Program drift, odd obsessions, possible madness.»

«I'm sorry for your loss,» Jang said.

I took a deep breath and shrugged. «Well, it's not so bad. I can't really tell that anything is missing. That's how it is, they tell me. And they gave me a new name and face, to spare me any embarrassment, should I ever run into my old cronies. Disengagement from the addictive circumstances, they call it. All part of the treatment.»

«I see,» said Jang. «What of your skills, your technical training? Did the process take them away, too?»

«No, I don't think so,» I said. «No, if you showed me an apple, I could probably still make a painting of it, and it would look like an apple. But it would only be an apple, neither more nor less, except by sheer accident. So I'm told, though I admit I've never felt like making the trial.»

Jang considered this. A long silence passed, while I tried to calm myself. The conversation had become unexpectedly uncomfortable. Usually I'm so grateful to be treated as a fully human person that I don't mind a little awkwardness. But this was too much, somehow.

Finally Jang stirred and spoke. «Leeson, I'd like to ask a favor of you. Would you do a sketch of the dead woman for me? We have the security camera images, but they were poorly defined, since she was well outside the perimeter. Hu Moon will issue you a slate and metastylus.»

«I suppose so,» I answered. «Why?»

«I'm a completist,» Jang said, with one of his almost imperceptible smiles.

«What about the analysis?» I asked, as Jang rose from the bench.

«The stone? It was curious stuff, quartz mainly, with a few rare earth inclusions and veins of magnetite. Odd crystalline structure, and nanoscale vesicles filled with sodium silicate. The ship computer seems to think it might become somewhat malleable, with a slight shift in the orientation. Similar in some ways to known silicon-based life forms, but no exact correspondences.» Jang nodded, closed his visor, and returned to the ship.

I WAS SITTING in the ship's observatory level, staring at the unmarked slate, when the alarm went off again.

This time I didn't rush to arm myself. I assumed Jang would deal with whatever specter was currently visiting the camp, and I didn't think I would be able to make any vital contribution to the defense. I went to the nearest port, which looked out on the camp and the ruins.

I caught a glimpse of Jang, armored and moving with unnatural swiftness. He passed through the perimeter and into the ruins. One of Graylin IV's small moons shed a dim light over the wasteland, but in his black armor Jang disappeared into the shadows, so that I soon lost sight of him.

Hu Moon's voice crackled over the ship's intercom. «Leeson! Where are you?»

«Here, in the lounge,» I said, still trying to see where Jang had gone.

«Is Irvane with you?»

«No. I'm alone. What's happening?»

But there was no answer. After a while the alarm cut off abruptly and the ship filled with silence.

I didn't want to go down to the perimeter, particularly. But in this case it seemed to me that I should find out why the alarm had sounded, and if some danger threatened. Aimless curiosity is one thing most of us can do without, but too much detachment can be dangerous, as I had been told by those who supervised my treatment. «You still have to pay attention to your environment,» they said. «Even if it doesn't interest you very much.»

At the northern edge of the perimeter, I found Hu Moon. She wore a suit of antique power armor, which had the appearance of tarnished silver inlaid with swirling gold lines in the pattern of her tattoos. Very stylish, I thought. She peered intently into the dark wastelands, a small graser held ready in her hands.

Dueine was peering from the doorway of their shelter, clutching the collar of her robe, her face tautly fearful. I couldn't see Irvane and evidently Jang was still outside. I approached Hu Moon, who whirled and pointed her weapon at me. I stopped and raised my hands carefully, in case she had a dumb gun.

«Just me,» I said.

«Leeson,» she said in a strained voice. «Where's your weapon? You're supposed to arm yourself whenever the alarm sounds.»

«Sorry,» I said. «I'll get it now.» But she'd already turned back to the darkness.

I got my smartgun and wished I owned a suit of power armor, as everyone else apparently did.

I assumed a suitably subservient position just behind Hu Moon and tried to see what she was looking for. «What is it?» I asked.

«Another impossibility,» she said. «And we can't find Irvane.»

«Impossibility? More dead giants?»

She shook her helmeted head impatiently. «No. Let's not get into it just now, all right? Just keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. In fact, why don't you make yourself useful? Go watch the south perimeter until Jang returns. Shout if you see anything strange.»

I was dismissed. I went reluctantly to the other side of the perimeter, which overlooked the remnants of the colony. The worn bones of the walls were pale stripes in the moonlight; the site was as peaceful as a graveyard.

The creatures seemed to rise from the ground.

There were dozens of them, squat and powerful, their naked almost-human bodies knotty with muscle, their skin white as marble. They might have been the trolls of Old Earth legends, or goblins or other fairy tale grotesques. But their faces were the faces of beautiful evil children, wearing small malicious smiles. They were so strange that I couldn't for a moment make a sound. They were still, but not as still as statues; they occasionally shifted position slightly, an inhumanly subtle movement that accented their impossibility.

They watched me with hungry lovely eyes; they looked like they wanted to kill me and eat me, but only after torturing me to the point of death. I suppose this might seem an excess of imagination, but I have no imagination. So I think I must have perceived the message of those terrible angelic faces accurately, though I could not now say exactly what there was about their expressions that seemed so dreadful. The faces were undistorted by anger or madness or any of the obvious darker human emotions.

I finally found my voice and croaked out a wordless sound of alarm, just as the main stuttergun swiveled toward the south. Hu Moon ran to me, armor clanking and whirring.

«What...?» she started to say, but then she saw the creatures.

«What are they?» I whispered.

«Not real,» she said firmly, shouldering her weapon.

I was wondering whether we ought to wait for Jang's return before committing any irrevocable act when she fired a long burst from her gun and shattered the nearest creature.

It disintegrated as if struck by a great hammer, its remnants clattering like gravel along the ground.

The other creatures took no notice, still watching us with undiminished intensity, or so it seemed.

«Why'd you do that?» I asked.

«Shut up, Leeson,» she answered. There seemed to be an edge of hysteria in her voice, for which I didn't blame her. I watched the creatures, who seemed unruffled by the death of their fellow goblin. She aimed at another and now the creatures flickered into swift erratic movement, moving in no discernible pattern beyond the perimeter, gray blurs in the uncertain light. The muzzle of her weapon jerked here and there, indecisively, and even I could tell that hitting one of the creatures would have been very difficult.

«What are they doing?» she said, finally.

«Playing hard to get,» I guessed.

Hu Moon kept her weapon trained on them, but did not fire again.

After a minute she asked, «If they come inside the perimeter, I don't know if the autoguns can deal with them. Why isn't Jang back?»

I might have mentioned my last glimpse of him, but she was clearly not interested in conversation with me.

Finally she turned away from the impossible creatures. «I'm going back to Dueine. She's frightened.»

«Me too,» I said, and in the moment I took my attention away from the creatures, they disappeared, as if into the ground. Which I suppose was exactly what happened.

Hu Moon looked back and her pale face grew paler in the glow of her helmet light, the blue contour lines of her tattoos too bright now.

«I can't deal with this,» she muttered, and I knew she was still wondering if Jang would return.

But in the morning, just after a redly ominous dawn, the weapons master returned, carrying a naked and mutilated body across his armored shoulder. He dropped Irvane just inside the perimeter and sat down heavily.

Hu Moon was there, still armored and armed. «What happened,» she croaked, in a thick sleep-deprived voice.

Jang shrugged. «They killed him.»

Jang's armor was scuffed and dusty. Here and there were small dents, as if stone fists had shattered against the metal.

Hu Moon knelt beside Irvane's corpse. His neck was purple with bruises; his genitals had been torn away. Dozens of small eruptions of tattered flesh marked him in a random pattern. It almost looked as though the tissues had been ripped open by explosions beneath the skin. I saw that the spiral of fur I found so amusing did indeed continue below his waist, with a line branching off toward his groin, where presumably it had encircled his missing penis.

«How?» asked Hu Moon. «And who were 'they'?»

«Monsters or mineral formations,» said Jang. «Take your pick.» His voice, as controlled as always through his helmet speaker, no longer seemed as polite, a perception that Hu Moon apparently shared with me.

«Could you possibly be less informative,» she said, and turned to face him, her posture expressing cold disapproval.

«Here is my recommendation,» Jang said. He unlatched his helmet and removed it. «Terminate the dig and stand off in orbit until a quarantine ship can get here.»

«What?» Hu Moon barked. «What are you talking about?»

«Two obvious possibilities exist,» Jang said. «Either we've contracted some sort of disease or other condition that causes shared hallucinations with attendant violent behavior... in which case we must not return to any inhabited world, lest it be contagious... or we have some heretofore undiscovered and malevolent life form preying on us, in which case we would be foolish to remain on the surface.»

«An oversimplification, surely!» said Hu Moon sharply. «Aren't we safe here inside the perimeter?»

«Perhaps,» said Jang. «Irvane left the perimeter, apparently by his own choice. The goblins took him away and made use of him before he died.» He indicated an area on Irvane's chest where the flesh was particularly torn. «Cruel kisses,» he said.

I didn't understand what he meant, not immediately. Then I got it -kisses so fierce they ruptured the flesh. I shuddered.

«What did you do about it?» Hu Moon moved away from the corpse, which was indeed difficult to look at. «And what do you mean, 'goblins'?»

«They didn't look like goblins to you?» Jang asked. «They were hard to kill. Very quick, very strong. Stone and quicksilver. I almost died. I destroyed only a few of them. At dawn they went away, or I'd be dead.»

«The important thing is that they're gone,» said Hu Moon.

«It's possible the survivors will be back.» Jang unlocked his gauntlets and removed them. He flexed his fingers slowly, as though they were painful to move.

«But what if they were just a shared hallucination?» Hu Moon asked.

«Then,» said Jang, with a rare glittering grin, «I killed Irvane, and almost killed myself. And I'm here with you, inside the perimeter.»

Hu Moon drew back fastidiously, her finely shaped mouth in a tight line. «We'll discuss this again after you've rested,» she said, and walked away.

No work was done on the site that day.

In the evening we gathered at our usual time to watch the day's computer decoding. I was startled to find that I missed Irvane's phlegmatic presence. Dueine was red-eyed and uncombed; she sat down beside me, ignoring an icy glance from Hu Moon.

«It's terrible, isn't it?» Dueine said. «Did you see him?»

«Yes,» I said, sipping my vegetable cocktail. Tonight I'd put an extra dash of hot sauce in it.

«I didn't.» She looked as though she might start sniffling at any moment. «Moon wouldn't let me. I guess that's better.»

«Umm,» I said noncommittally.

«I didn't like him.» Dueine drew her mouth down into a gesture of distaste. «I always had the feeling he was a lech, and not a nice one, like you.»

I was surprised by this outburst of uncomfortable honesty and didn't know how to reply.

She continued, in a low voice. «Once he asked me how old I was, and when I told him I was twenty-three standard, he didn't seem as interested as before. Do you know what I mean? I look young for my age, I know. Moon says I'll be glad someday.»

I could feel Hu Moon's frozen glare on my back, but Dueine no longer looked like she might burst into tears. Evidently her fright had been replaced by disgust, a more containable emotion.

I couldn't help remembering the faces of the goblins, the faces of angelic children who might do anything. I shuddered. There was some unpleasant connection there that my burned-away imagination might have made, once.

Jang clarified the matter. He slipped in, still wearing the sweat-stained quilted undersuit that padded his battle armor, an air of distraction further masking his face. There was a trembling of nervous energy in the way he moved that I hadn't seen before. He selected a cigarette from the communal humidor, lit it, and took a deep drag.

«I've done a bit of research,» he said, speaking from a cloud of smoke. «We're a somewhat flawed group, and this fact may have something to do with the phenomena we've witnessed these last several days.»

Hu Moon made a faint disparaging grunt. «I don't see...,» she began.

Jang spoke over her. «Let's consider Flash, the dead icicle. He was condemned to brain-limited servitude for a series of murders. These were particularly vile– he killed pregnant human women and eviscerated them.» Jang paused to take another hit. This time no one interrupted him.

«Flash chose his victims carefully,» Jang continued. «They were all very large women. Flash, as you may remember, was a small man. When he was finally apprehended, he was hiding within the body cavity of his last victim. The authorites assumed this was a pattern duplicated in all his murders. He refused to explain his purpose, but the jurists at his trial assumed some psychosexual obsession.»

«He must have been crazy,» Dueine said, unnecessarily.

«Yes,» said Jang politely. «But, as Flash was a nobody, distinguished only by his crimes, no one cared to delve into the whys and wherefores. So he was summarily brainburned and put into inventory.»

We were all remembering the giant dead woman, or so I supposed.

«What about Irvane?» I asked.

Jang sighed and took another puff. «I checked his will.»

«His will?» Hu Moon seemed irritated by Jang's initiative.

He shrugged. «Sometimes people use their wills to seek absolution for past misdeeds or to complain of past mistreatment. I thought it worth a try, since his will became a public record upon Irvane's death. You all signed similar disclosure papers before we embarked.»

«What did you find?»

«Irvane used his will to name his likely assassin, should he be found dead.»

«He was worried about being killed?» Hu Moon seemed skeptical.

«Yes. With good reason,» said Jang. «Irvane's frailty had to do with the sexual exploitation of children. Have none of you wondered what a scientist of his reputation was doing on a relatively unimportant expedition?»

Hu Moon made a hissing sound of disapproval. «There are no unimportant expeditions, in the field of pangalac archaeology.»

«No doubt,» Jang said. «I intended no offense.»

«What did he do?» Dueine asked, oblivious to Jang's attempted diplomacy. Her eyes were wide, and I wondered if she had failed to understand the implications of Jang's words. I am not stupid, and I felt a perverse pleasure in my sudden certainty that Irvane and I were not the only misfits on Graylin IV. On the other hand, I now had further cause for resentment. My crime was spending other people's money. Irvane's was much worse, or so it seemed to me, yet he got away unchanged.

«Irvane made a mistake,» Jang said. «For most of his life, he pursued his hobbies among children he found aboard various Holding Arks, children who were desperate for any form of subsidy, no matter the source or the cost. Children who could see Irvane as a benefactor, despite his unpleasant attentions. But in a thoughtless moment, he initiated an inappropriate relationship with the young son of Angus Drimm, the notorious Howlytown magnate from Dilvermoon.»

Hu Moon raised her eyebrows. «Odd that he survived. One hears stories about Drimm and his kind.»

«Evidently he thought it best to depart Dilvermoon for a time. Perhaps Irvane hoped to be among Drimm's less important enemies by the time he returned from Graylin.» Jang sat and shook his head. «Personally, I think his strategy was poorly considered.»

«Maybe Irvane was killed by Howlytown enforcers,» Dueine said fearfully.

I sighed. Hu Moon rolled her eyes. Only Jang was kind enough to explain. «I think not,» he said. «Whatever the creatures were, they were not human, or members of any other sapient species of which I'm aware.»

A thick uneasy silence followed, as each of us considered the matter in our own way. Dueine's eyes watered and her plump lower lip trembled. Hu Moon maintained a stony expression, though she seemed to have developed a small twitch under one large eye, and Jang was, as always, still and self-contained. I felt an odd anxious relief. I'd been proven right. There was something to fear, here on this dull little world, and I had been the first one to feel it. Leeson had noticed something that four uncrippled people had missed. Well, Jang had sensed something. Maybe the others, too, and they just hadn't felt the need to talk to me about it.

«I don't understand,» Dueine said. «What does this have to do with how he died? How Flash died?»

Hu Moon spoke impatiently to her protégé. «Didn't you see the creatures? Terrible children, weren't they?»

Insight widened Dueine's eyes. «Oh,» she said.

Jang nodded. «It's my guess that the dead giant and the terrible children were the creation of their victims. They imagined them into existence, somehow. I don't know how this is possible, but we all saw the creatures.» Jang's soft voice changed slightly, took on a barely perceptible dramatic edge, a tone I had never heard from him. «We seem to have fallen into a fairy tale.»

A question occurred to me. «How did Flash imagine such a monster? He was brainburned.»

Jang looked at me. «The brainburning procedure used with criminals like Flash is unsophisticated. It's only necessary to subtract volition. No one bothers with the fine details. No one cares enough about them to weed away former obsessions from icicle convicts– who cares what they think about, so long as they are incapable of acting? Any associated suffering is well-deserved, most people say.»

I don't think he was speaking about me.

«Besides,» Hu Moon said, «Flash wasn't killed by his monster. Or not directly.»

«A point,» said Jang. «But he got to see it, it would seem, and his excitement reached a fatal level. Another point: Irvane went willingly with his children– they didn't touch him until he left the perimeter.» He paused. «I think we're safe inside the perimeter... but I'll set up more gun pods.»

The longest silence yet followed. I suppose they were all wondering about the things that might be birthed from their darkest imaginings. Wondering if those things could kill us.

Finally Hu Moon shook her head. «Well, we're not criminals, Dueine and I. We should be safe.»

I looked away. I felt immune, of course, and somehow desolate.

EVENTUALLY WE TURNED our attention to the day's accumulation of decoded records. The colony computer's memory stack had been more heavily damaged on the uppermost layers, and as we approached the end of the record, the images began to deteriorate in quality. The video enhancement was unsatisfactory. Whenever the computer was forced to bridge over a bad segment, the video had that plastic antiseptic quality that inevitably marks computer reconstruction. Some segments were entirely inaccessible and caused odd jumps in the video. The computer sometimes added informative captions to the more obscure scenes.

That night we watched a funeral. One adult and a child were laid out beside a hole large enough for both, the bodies wrapped tightly in gray ship-issue cloth. The other colonists stood about the burial site, wearing solemn faces, heads bowed, listening to a chaplain who spoke beside the hole, his eyes wide, his gestures dramatic, his gray dreadlocks flying. His audience seemed nervous, their eyes furtive. Those at the fringes of the crowd seemed especially uneasy, occasionally turning to glance at the empty wilderness behind them.

The chaplain finished his eulogy and the bodies were carefully lowered into the hole. Two men came forward with shovels and began to fill the grave. Some of the nearest mourners sobbed, but most of the colonists hurried away, their eyes anxious.

The computer skipped ahead, until the hole was full and only three mourners remained.

One was Suhaili the Pipemaker, wearing a black mourning veil that hid her expression. Across the grave a tall man with harsh features held the hand of a small child. His face was wooden with loss; the child was too young for anything but confusion and fear.

She spoke to the man; he looked away without replying. She raised a hand in a pleading gesture, but he turned and marched out of the camera's frame. Suhaili stood alone above the grave, and after a moment she covered her face with her hands and her shoulders began to shake. The camera operator receded, until she was a tiny figure against the gray landscape.

Jang went to the console and shut down the holotank. «Enough of that,» he said.

In my shelter that night, when the camp was silent, I tried my hand at making a drawing of the giantess. The stylus flew over the slate with surprising ease as I sketched a rough charcoal of the thing... screaming, wide-mouthed, in mid-stagger, with arms lifted in horrid entreaty. I felt nothing but a growing sickness in my stomach. I formed no connection with the image I was making, other than the weighing of light and dark, the calculations of angles and lines, the mechanical addition of texture, all premeditated, lifeless, meaningless movements of my hand. I felt what must have been a pale echo of the sort of grief I'd once felt watching a holovid of a dear lost lover. The watchers in my brain must have been busy.

At breakfast, Hu Moon announced that we would continue with the dig. She was moody, but definite. «I see no reason to waste the University's funds by returning to Dilvermoon now. We've had a death among our group.

«Naturally we're upset, but such things sometimes happen on wild worlds. I won't abandon my responsibilities because of some foolish theory.»

She gave Jang a dark look, but his face was placid and he nodded. «You're the expedition leader,» he said. «It's your decision.»

«Yes, it is,» she said firmly. «This will mean more work, but I'm sure we'll all compensate. Leeson, you'll run the materials analyzer today. Dueine will tend the mapping mech.»

Dueine pouted. «But I meant to update my journals today. So much has happened.»

Hu Moon had no patience with her protege. «Things have changed,» she snapped. Dueine's eyes seemed to water, but she nodded submissively.

Later I handed my drawing to Jang. He took it with a murmur of thanks, but made no comment, for which I was grateful.

During the following days we found more of the pipes carved from the white stone, though the one Irvane had kept seemed to have disappeared. The pipes were often stylized little effigies, slewed into some disturbing shape. There was one pipe with a bowl carved to resemble a head with tangled hair and a mouth ringed with inward-hooking needle teeth– a lamprey eel in human form. We found several well-made turtle pipes, each with a face carved into its back, and each face presented a different emotion in starkly stylized form: terror, joy, sexual abandon, grief. Whenever we discovered a pipe made of the white stone that I'd taken from the fragments of the dead giantess, Jang put them into a security locker, to which only he and Hu Moon had access.

An archaeologist, I think, could have written a good monograph on cannabis pipes produced by a culture obsessed with the drug and its adjuncts. Some of the most powerful art I've seen was born from some variety of religious mania– the cathedrals of Old Earth, the spirit caverns of Odun VII, the widow pools of Noctile. To my once-educated eye, the pipes left by the dead colony, though less ostentatious than those familiar examples, were in their own way just as profound. Any object, however mundane, if used in a daily religious ritual must inevitably come to have great significance for its user. And these objects were extraordinary to begin with.

My favorite find was a pipe carved to resemble a female torso, curving up from the pipestem like a cobra. Her face was hidden behind a veil of delicate hair, which billowed back around her back and surrounded the bowl. The stone that formed the hair was so thinly carved that light glimmered through it, showing a faint internal opalescence.

This was one of Suhaili's finest works, as I saw from the reconstructed computer record one evening.

The ship showed us a scene in Suhaili Pipemaker's workshop, a roofed-over arcade at the back of her house. She had cultivated a hedge of tall ferny plants at the edge of the flagstone floor, and they cast a soft dappled light over her as she sat at a lapidary grinder. I imagined the screech of stone against the spinning abrasive wheel, the smell of hot mineral dust, the perfume of the woman.., something rich and strange. Hu Moon had worked us unmercifully on the site, and this night I was so tired that I was in danger of slipping into a dream. I was willing to dream of Suhaili. Over the past few days my interest in her had deepened and become something close to infatuation. I watched the nightly archives hoping for a glimpse of her, though lately she was rarely seen. Perhaps the romance between her and the camera operator had waned, a thought I found childishly pleasing. Apparently desire could somehow span the centuries that separated us.

She turned toward the camera, something small and white in her hands. As if the cameraman's eyes had widened and fixed on the object she held, the viewpoint zoomed in, to fill the holotank with the pipe glittering white against the dark pink of her palm.

«We found that yesterday,» I said, surprised by this sudden connection to the present. The pipe she held then, two thousand years past, was the same as the one I'd discovered under a frost-heaved tussock of moss at the far side of the site.

«Where did it come from?» Hu Moon asked, frowning at her dataslate. «Ah. I see the arcade, and here, the rest of the structure. Leeson! Tomorrow, you'll move the excavator to that spot. The pipemaker seems pivotal in whatever is going on; we'll concentrate on her house for a while.»

«Yes,» I said, still watching the tank. The camera jerked away from the pipe and zoomed in on Suhaili's face. Again I admired the clarity and perfection of her features. Her cheekbones were high and smoothly prominent under flawless black velvet skin. Her lips were full. Her eyes were large, heavy-lidded, tilted up at the outer corners. They suddenly widened in shock, and the camera spun away from her to follow the pipe as it bounced away along the tiled floor, obviously slapped from her hand by the camera operator. The viewpoint slid up to jiggle aimlessly across the thatched ceiling of the arcade.

«They're arguing,» Jang said.

«What about?» wondered Dueine.

I think it was clear to the rest of us that the disagreement concerned the pipe. To me, at least, it was obvious that the pipes were dangerous. Flash found a pipe and died. Irvane took the pipe and died. It suddenly struck me that if Irvane had not taken the pipe with him when he had gone out to meet the terrible children, then someone still had it.

That night we saw the metal warriors for the first time.

There was no alarm when they came, because Jang was waiting for them. He'd installed additional security sensors on the site, so that he would be notified if anything larger than an insect moved amid the ruins. He woke me from a disturbing dream about the pipemaker, in which she offered me a black pipe carved with my own face. I was confused and resentful on waking, because this was the most interesting dream I'd had since my treatment.

«Leeson,» whispered Jang over the intercom. «Come to the ship.»

I found him on the observatory level, sitting at a broad viewport, staring out at the steppe. He was armored, but his helmet sat beside him on a table.

«What is it?» I asked.

«I don't know,» he said softly. «But I think something is happening. Maybe stone is coming in.» A telescreen glowed with greenish pseudolight beside the port; visible in the screen was a subtle crawling motion, as if the moss were being disturbed by the passage of small creatures.

«Maybe,» I said. I remembered the way the fragments of the dead giantess had wriggled away into the ground.

Jang sat back with a sigh, and from the table picked up a pipe, which I hadn't noticed at first. I saw with a shock that it was the artifact possessed first by Flash and then by Irvane.

Jang struck a light, drew on the pipe, and the distinctive burning-brush scent of cannabis filled the air. Despite my condition, the scent awoke pleasant memories– other and better times.

Still the sight of the pipe made me anxious. «Is that wise?» I asked. «The pipe seems to attract violence.»

«So do I,» Jang said, smiling. «But though you're right to be concerned, it seemed an experiment worth making. I'm better equipped than you or Hu Moon to defend myself from whatever I summon up.»

This seemed irrational to me, and I regarded Jang with doubt. He glanced at me and laughed briefly. «I know,» he said. «But it's my nature to attack rather than defend, to initiate conflict on my own terms. I've taken precautions– extra stuttergun emplacements on all firing lanes, ankle-cutter graser net inside the perimeter. Hu Moon and Dueine are in the control room, ready to lift ship should that become prudent.»

I became aware of a low vibration– the throb of the ship's engines idling, a sensation I hadn't felt in months. I felt a brief flash of resentment that I had not been included in the planning of this evening, but I supposed Hu Moon felt no obligation to keep the expedition's repairman informed. «Why did you ask me to come up?» I asked, somewhat sharply.

«If something happens, I want your confirmation,» Jang said, putting down his pipe. «And I think something's going on now.»

In the telescreen, a shape rose from the ground, man-shaped but taller than most men. Five meters away, a similar shape gathered itself together, indistinct in the green pseudolight.

Jang touched the dataslate on his wrist and a harsh white light flooded the ruins.

The warriors were beautiful to look at; even I thought so.

«Skelt fighters,» Jang said. Later he would tell me that «skelts» were the meter-long blades that began at each warrior's elbows, attached by articulating swivels to the forearm, so that the handgrip, perpendicular to the sweep of the blade, could control the blade's angle of attack as it met a parry, or the body of an opponent.

One warrior was male, one female, their genders obvious through the light armor each wore. The male's armor seemed fashioned from a pale yellow metal; the female's armor had the gloss and depth of polished obsidian. Their faces were concealed beneath elaborate ceremonial helmets. The male warrior's helmet caricatured a simian face, twisted with dementia; the female's a carnivorous reptile, with needle teeth and a spiky crest.

The spotlights didn't seem to bother them. They turned toward the ship and performed elaborate salutes with their weapons. Jang stood beside me, his face paler then usual and tinged with an expression I could not decipher. It was clear that the salutes were for him.

For a long moment the two figures were absolutely still; then they sprang at each other, a whirl of glitter, their skelts moving with such speed that the human eye saw only the visual trails of the movements, a gossamer blossom of light around the combatants, delicate and shifting. Jang touched a button and a faint metallic singing came through the speakers, the sound of the blades sliding against each other. It seemed like faraway music, and in the rhythmic sound I could almost recognize a melody.

«They're very convincing,» Jang said. A splash of hot sparks burst from the right shoulder of the male; evidently his opponent had penetrated his guard. He faltered, and the blossom of light changed, became thinner and smaller on his right side.

«He's lost,» Jang said, and turned away, but I watched. A moment later he staggered as her skelt sank deeply into his armor at the base of his neck. The other blade drove into the other side of his neck and as she jerked her weapons free, his head toppled from his shoulders.

He remained on his feet for a moment, his own weapons dropping until their tips touched the ground. The headless body knelt, almost gracefully, then fell forward and shattered into a thousand wriggling fragments.

Later Jang told me about the ritual on his home world, using terms like honor and courage and principle... terms that I suspected meant entirely different things to him than they did to me. His face was unreadable but I saw a slight tremor in his hands as he spoke. «The skelt was our religion, Leeson.» He shook his sleek head. «Steel made us holy and steel brought us low. The skelt decided our great questions for us, and there was always wisdom in the steel, or so it seemed. But over the centuries we changed, and the skelt became our politics as well as our religion and oracle.»

«It doesn't sound so bad,» I said. «If I understand you rightly, a politician on your world sometimes had to fight for his life. The process must have weeded out some of the sociopaths that infest the governments of other worlds.»

«I suppose so. But it was corrupted, and became a bludgeon for enforcing class and status. The skelts are expensive to own and expensive to train with. What peasant or small merchant could ever challenge a lord, when that lord had been trained since early childhood in the use of the weapons? So we became a society of low-born assassins who struck from concealment, and bloodthirsty courtiers who accumulated power by collecting the heads of their enemies.» He shook his head. «It became very bad.» And then he told me about his world, the academies of war, the festive holidays marked by contests between great champions, the joyful years he had spent in the service of various masters. A kind of reverence suffused his hard features while he spoke, but the light eventually dimmed and he fell silent.

I was quiet for a while too, until my curiosity overcame caution. «I've never heard the story of why you left your home world,» I said.

Jang smiled, his usual subtle twitch of the lips. «It's an old story, like yours. But different. I was challenged in an unavoidable way by a man whose death at my hands would have been a terrible disgrace. I could have killed him without effort but then I would have been destroyed as a man of my world.»

«So you left?»

«Yes. It was the somewhat less dishonorable action. I traveled to Dilvermoon, I offered my skills to a mercenary recruiter there, and here I am, some years later, and I no longer recognize myself.»

I tried to hear bitterness in his words, but it didn't seem to be there.

Jang looked out at the ruins and shut off the lights. «The show appears to be over for tonight,» he said.

«I guess,» I said. It occurred to me with sudden force that Jang admired the skelt fighters with an intensity that a man like me could not possibly understand. «Jang,» I said cautiously. «Do you still own a set of skelts?»

«Oh, yes,» he said. «They hang in my pod, oiled and sharpened, next to my armor.»

He took a generous pinch of cannabis from a pouch and poked it into the pipe, which seemed to look up at him with avid stone eyes. He lit the pipe with a fingertip torch and drew in the smoke.

«Leeson, do you know why I like this stuff so much?» he asked.

«No,» I answered. I'd never felt any great affinity for the drug, which had seemed old-fashioned, even quaint, compared with all the ferociously distracting and gloriously bizarre pleasure drugs available to a moneyed citizen of Dilvermoon.

«It's a memory drug, you know.» Jang gestured with the pipe. «But not old memory. It thins out the new memories crowding into your head from every sense, every thought, every impulse. It lets you see what you want to see with unclouded clarity, without distraction, if that's your choice. Useful in my profession.»

«I suppose so,» I said dubiously. «What if you concentrate on the wrong thoughts?» I thought about Flash and Irvane and their monsters.

Jang nodded. «Always a possibility,» he said. «An overactive imagination might be a liability to a man in my business.» He shook his head. «On the other hand, my business, in brief, is killing. I don't mean to speak in cliches, but isn't it true that death is the last mystery? Trillions have died; none have sent back reports. We still wonder what death might be, even now, when dying is a final choice and not a grim necessity, for most pangalac citizens. Surprising, isn't it... even when death has become a remote abstraction for most of us, religions promising life after death continue to bloom and spread and metastasize into newer and gaudier and ever more irrational forms.» He laughed, a brief reluctant sound I'd never heard from him before.

«In any case, we who are close to death, who touch it with our hands... we often find ourselves distracted by poetry and mysticism. Thus the killer monk, the meditative slayer, the grandly mad murderer of fiction and history.

«But usually my imagination is limited to a kind of... theatrical paranoia. I feel armies coming for me, gorgeously cruel warriors hungry for my blood.» He shook his sleek head. «Tonight I saw them rising from the stones, like soldiers born of dragon teeth.»

«Cadmus,» I muttered. «Sowed the teeth himself.»

«You're well educated,» said Jang.

He tapped the ashes from his pipe and went away, leaving me to envy his imagination, despite its limitations.

THE FEMALE WARRIOR in the obsidian armor came to the ruins every night for a week, each time defeating a different opponent, until she was finally destroyed by a warrior in glossy crimson armor. His helmet depicted some insectile god with large compound eyes and sawtoothed mouth parts. After his victory he raised his head and bellowed his triumph to the moons, a shout with a buzzing inhuman undertone.

On the next night Jang went out to meet the crimson warrior, without a word to any of us, but for some reason he turned on the ship's alarms before he left.

The sound brought the survivors to the viewports in the ship's lounge, and we saw the whole thing.

Jang wore a suit of armor in an antique style, brown iron plate with dull blue lapis inlaid into the iron in jagged patterns.

He whirled his blades with what appeared to be great skill but he lived for only a few moments. The crimson warrior brushed aside his guard, almost casually, and an instant later, Jang's head fell backward from his shoulders. As I watched, I felt a surprisingly strong sense of loss, mixed with fear. Who would protect us now?

Hu Moon, who watched the brief combat from the port beside me, beat her fists against the thick crystal. «What a fool,» she said.

In the morning we buried him well away from the site, so as not to contaminate the dig. Hu Moon at first talked about continuing the excavation, but several days passed and she stayed in her quarters with Dueine.

The skelt fighters continued their duels, but something had gone from the performances. There was an increasingly weary quality to the ritual, an almost palpable reluctance visible in the body language of the fighters.

I had the impression that they might soon stop, and turn to other matters.

I occupied myself by watching the final days of the colony, as the ship decoded the last of the damaged data stack. There were many more burials recorded by the colony's historian, though his camera work grew ever more unsteady and perfunctory. I didn't see Suhaili the Pipemaker again; perhaps she had already died in the violence that was decimating the colony.

I caught only glimpses of the creatures who were destroying the colony– they seemed like the nightmares of an alien culture, which I suppose they were.

Many colonists died at the hands of creatures who looked like week-old corpses dug from moist graves, bloated faces shining with patches of blue-white decay. One entire family was torn to pieces by a pack of three-legged dwarves with feathered skins and cruel talons, while the camera watched, shaking so much that it was hard to see what was happening. There were beautiful succubi with long teeth, stony giants with white eyes, and a surprising variety of other monstrosities, all of which I took to be creatures from Jaworld's rich mythic tradition. I recognized some from my travels there-duppies, zombies, chickcharneys. It was hard to watch, even the quick glimpses of killing captured before the videographer fled, and sometimes I had to turn from the holotank. The colonists had wandered so far from Jaworld, and even separated by centuries from that home, they were still vulnerable to the horrors that flowered there. They apparently had few guns with which to defend themselves; most were armed only with agricultural implements like axes and mattocks and cane knives. It was slaughter.

In the evening after I left the ship, I would lie in my bed and wonder how long it took for a people to find new fears on new worlds.

When Hu Moon finally emerged from her quarters, she discovered that Jang, in accordance with his instructions from the insurer, had temporarily disabled the ship's main engines. We no longer had the option of leaving immediately.

She called a meeting that evening to explain. «It's a quarantine lockout,» she said, pacing back and forth in the ship's lounge. «The idea, I suppose, is that in four standard months either we'll have resolved the situation or we'll all be dead and won't be able to lift the ship.» She snorted. «Good from the liability viewpoint, but inconvenient. I'd leave tonight if I could. We've established every important detail regarding the colony's failure, we have an acceptable variety of artifacts, and the colony's datastack. No one would criticize us for quitting.»

Dueine raised a tentative hand. «But, Moon, I still don't really understand what killed the colonists. Or what killed Irvane and Jang.»

Hu Moon sighed and rolled her eyes, and Dueine noticed. Dull hurt clouded her usually clear young eyes. I spoke up. «I'm sure we don't know everything about the killers. But it seems we've attracted the attention of an imitative, predatory life-form.» Hu Moon nodded at me, so I continued. «Apparently these creatures self-assemble out of small components, and they take on the shape of our dreams or maybe our fears. The colonists smoked a lot of cannabis, which probably made it worse, probably made their monsters even more vivid.»

«Will we die?» Dueine asked. «I don't want to.»

«No no,» I said quickly. «I'm sure we'll be safe inside the perimeter. They know about the stutterguns.» Besides, I thought, what could such a young and unformed person have to fear?

Hu Moon listened to this exchange with obvious impatience. «There's nothing so strange about this. There are many other chameleon species on the pangalac worlds,' she said.

«True,» I said. «But I seem to remember that most of them are limited to imitating actual physical objects.»

Hu Moon made a dismissing gesture. «Doesn't matter. All we have to do is sit tight until Jang's engine lockout expires, and then we'll go. It'll give Dueine and me an opportunity to organize the logs and write the reports. It's not going to be so easy to make this look like a success.»

She hurried out, with Dueine trailing miserably behind. I felt sorry for the young woman, who had obviously begun to serve as a focus for Hu Moon's irritation with the state of affairs.

Hu Moon and Dueine moved back into the ship, evidently believing that the ship was safer. I soon followed them; the solidity of the ship and its internal security systems were somehow comforting. I kept to my cabin during the day, listening to my small collection of music. Increasingly my thoughts turned to Suhaili the Pipemaker.

At night I tried to do Jang's job, since Hu Moon was simply hiding and hoping for the best. Days passed that I didn't see her or Dueine at all. Then we'd meet in a corridor or I'd see her in the lounge, picking up a bottle. She grew haggard, and lost some of her beauty.

I found a spare suit of servo armor, and began wearing it at night. It was awkward, but I felt a little safer as I walked the perimeter. I checked the guns and sensors every night, and I tried to think of ways to make the perimeter more secure. I considered asking Hu Moon to thaw out some icicle labor and have them stand sentry duty. A moment's thought convinced me that was a bad idea. The icicles weren't smart enough to be effective. More to the point, we really didn't need to find out what demons had driven them to their crimes.

Almost two weeks after Jang's death the dead scholars appeared. I hadn't seen Hu Moon more than a handful of times in those weeks. There were no more evening social occasions.

The monsters kept their distance but I found them oddly fascinating. Watching them at their inexplicable pursuits provided the only amusement available to me. I was lonely, and I finally understood how much Jang's distant friendship had meant to me.

At night there was always something going on in the ruins. Irvane's terrible goblins had returned to the site, and every evening they fought, battling each other with fists and teeth, with crude clubs, with swords fashioned of jagged stone chips embedded in limber sticks. These combats were mostly brief skirmishes. I had the feeling they were testing each other. But once two of them fought to the death, and the loser dissolved into the soil in a mass of wriggling stone worms

The first scholar appeared to be a somewhat frail elderly human, wearing a tweedy suit, in a fashion not seen in Dilvermoon for centuries. It tottered through the moonlit ruins in an unsteady path, leaning on a cane, with a look of almost convincing terror on its kindly face.

It approached me where I sat beside the perimeter.

«Young man,» it quavered. «I seem to have gotten myself lost.»

In other circumstances I might have been amused by this archaic mode of speech. «Young man»? I shifted my smart gun so it pointed at the creature.

It blinked large watery eyes. «Son? Is that a weapon you're aiming at me?»

«Yes,» I answered. «It is.»

It laughed timidly. «You won't need that. I'm harmless. But I don't know where I am.»

«You're on Graylin IV,» I said. «How is it you don't know that?»

A passing twitch of some alien emotion crossed its face, so quickly I couldn't interpret it. «Are you in charge here, son?»

«No.»

An unpleasant sharpness edged its voice. «Then I suggest you find your superior. Immediately.»

I nodded. Even if I couldn't imagine a reason why a human should suddenly appear on this empty world, that didn't mean such a thing was impossible. My imagination, after all, was no longer good for much of anything.

«I'll fetch her,» I said. In a moment of thoughtlessness, I attempted a courtesy. «Would you like to rest here?»

«How kind,» it said. And it stepped across the perimeter, as if to sit down in the chair I had just vacated.

The stuttergun blew it into gravel. An instant later a shriek of dismay made me turn toward the ship. Hu Moon rushed from the lower egress, her hands raised in horror. She ran up to me and looked out at the place where the stuttergun had destroyed the scholar. «Oh no, no,» she said, clutching her head with both hands. «We've killed V. S. P. Swin. Oh, this is terrible.»

«Who? No,» I said. «It was one of them. See, there's no body, the stone worms have already burrowed away.»

Her eyes were rolling in a manner I had never expected from the ordinarily composed Hu Moon. «Are you sure?» she asked. «I know his face as well as my own. It was him, I saw him on the security monitors.»

«I'm sure it wasn't human.» I waved my hand at the ruins, where the other monsters went about their business, oblivious to the scholar's destruction. «Who are you talking about?»

«V. S. P. Swin! He discovered the tectonic machines on Meld. He's a god in pangalac archaeology. He revived the Single Point Diaspora theory of human expansion. A god!»

«You knew him?» I asked.

She blinked and put her hands down. «No, but I've seen every holodoc he ever made and he made a lot.»

«So you never met him?»

«Of course not,» she said with a sneer, apparently trying to regain her dignity. «He died 700 standard years before I was born. But I would have given anything to speak with him. He could tell me what's going on here. On this terrible little world.»

She hurried back into the ship, leaving me to wonder about her sanity.

By the time the next scholar appeared, two nights later, Hu Moon had given me explicit instructions regarding what she called «manifestations.»

I was not to injure or provoke them, should they attempt communication. I was to carry a security camera at all times, so that she could personally evaluate any interaction I had with these manifestations. And I was to call her the instant any manifestation reminded me in any way of V. S. P. Swin.

Three nights later the next scholar staggered in through the moonlit ruins. It looked something like a plump, pink-haired woman in an out-of-fashion dress. It was drunk, apparently, its red face alight with carelessly concealed malice. Its features were surprisingly sharp in that round face. There was a curious pallor to its face, and a sense of transparency. Later I would realize that it was like looking at a malleable white marble bust cloaked with a thin layer of living skin.

«Oho, the gatekeeper,» it shouted. It stopped, wobbling, a good meter short of the perimeter. Its gaze flicked up and down the line, marked by sensors glowing a faint red against the black soil. The movement of its head was inhumanly swift, and I wondered how anyone could mistake such a creature for a real person. «You planning to kill me, too?» it asked. «Like you did poor old Swin?»

I nodded politely. «I can't prevent the gun from firing, if a non-carbon-based life-form crosses the perimeter. Jang locked the security system into that mode, and only he could reset it.»

«And you? Do you suspect me?» Its eyes were too sharp. «Why?»

«Well,» I said. «To me, you're implausible.»

«'Implausible?' What a learned word to come from the mouth of the lawn boy.» It smiled condescendingly, but for some reason I was only amused.

«It seems like the appropriate word,» I said. «For example, the satellite security web reports no other ships have touched down here since our arrival. In fact, no other ships have come within the system limits.»

«Fah!» it said. «Are you so bereft of imagination you can't come up with an alternative?»

«Well, yes,» I said. «I suppose that's my only advantage.»

«Well, imagine we're part of an intellectual community set up here before you arrived. What then?»

«Is that your claim? Then consider Dr. Swin. Did you know he wasn't human?»

«You say he wasn't. Not me!»

I shrugged. «I saw the doctor's remnants turn to stone and wiggle away into the ground.»

«Yes, we've noticed there's an extremely rapid decomposition cycle here on good old Graylin IV.» It made a harsh sound, almost a bark, but then its mouth turned up at the corners and I understood that it was laughing.

«Ahhh...,» it said, shaking its head. «Not easy to fool a moron, is it? Never mind, Leeson, you don't matter.»

«How do you know who I am?» This was unpleasant, being named by a predator on an alien world. It made our situation seem particularly precarious.

«Doesn't matter,» it said. «Go get the bosslady, young man. I need to talk to someone who's got enough imagination to believe in impossible things.» It gave me another cruel glance. «That's almost everyone but you.»

I would have killed it happily then, but Hu Moon was already running from the ship, armored and carrying a smartgun. I assumed she'd come to her senses and that we would question the creature together, learn as much about it as possible, and then destroy it.

«Maidan O'Binion,» Hu Moon said, in awestruck tones. «It's really you?»

«Yes, dear. It's me, and I'm delighted to be here,» it said briskly.

«Well, please,» Hu Moon said breathlessly. «Come in, sit down. I'm so glad to finally meet you.»

It shook its head. «No, dear, I'm afraid I can't. Your little janitor tells me the ship's security will blow up anyone who comes into the perimeter, if they're not part of the original crew. Inconvenient, but we'll have to have our little conference right here. But do send the janitor away; his face is too leaden to bear.»

«Go back to the ship,» Hu Moon ordered.

I was astonished. «It's one of them! Can't you tell?» I said in fairly shrill tones. «It'll kill you if you give it the chance. This is another of your heroes, isn't it? Another one that's been dead a few hundred years? Ask it how it got here.»

The creature laughed again. «Dear lad, have you never heard of cloning? Of experiential transfers? Of private lazarus havens?» It winked at me.

Hu Moon turned to me. I couldn't see her face behind the visor of her armor, but her voice was flat. «Back to the ship.»

I went away. I had the security video. If she survived her encounter with the creature, I would show it to her.

But when she returned to the ship at daybreak, her face was exalted and she refused to look at the recording.

«You might be right,» she said. «At the moment, I don't care. She stays on her side of the line; I stay on mine. I'm armed and armored. What can happen?»

«Ask Jang,» I said.

She made a petulant face. «That was obviously different. Maidan didn't have a sword, or even a dagger.»

«Maybe it doesn't need it.»

«Yes, maybe she plans to talk me to death.» Her tone was sarcastic. «I don't care. I've been going crazy, locked up in my cabin with Dueine and no one to talk with.»

I didn't know how to respond.

«It's really none of your business, Leeson,» she said. «It's a risk I'm willing to take. I mean, Maidan O'Binion! The greatest cultural anthropologist of the last two millennia. When I was talking to her, it was like a blinding light. I've never had a conversation like that. I've been so bored! Oh, it's so good to talk to someone with an actual brain. I won't give that up.»

A moment later I noticed Dueine standing in the doorway, head bowed fearfully, hands clasped together tightly under her breasts, a posture that suggested she'd been listening for a while.

Hu Moon turned and saw her, but offered no apology or explanation. When she turned back to me, her eyes were hard. «Stay off the perimeter, until further notice. In fact, I want you to stay in the ship. Maidan told me she'd return tonight with some of her friends. I don't trust you to act reasonably.»

I nodded. «You're the bosslady,» I said.

She looked at me sharply, but said no more.

THREE OF THE CREATURES returned to the perimeter that night, and I watched from the ship as Hu Moon went out to meet them. She stayed with them until dawn, all of them talking animatedly. All of them full of large gestures, wide smiles beaming at each other, very collegial, as though they were meeting over coffee and pastry in the senior teacher's lounge. But beyond them, in the ruins, two skelt fighters moved through a stately ritual, and I occasionally glimpsed one of Irvane's frightening children, slipping quickly through the broken stones.

Hu Moon removed her helmet and set her gun aside early in the evening, though she kept to her side of the security line.

She returned to the ship as the dim brown light began to paint the ruins. I went down to meet her.

«They could have killed you easily,» I said as she walked slowly into the lower egress bay.

Her eyes were dreamy, her face a little flushed, as though with a pleasant excitement. She stripped off her armor and hung it in a security locker, without looking at me. When it became obvious that she had nothing to say, I went back to my quarters, there to doze through the day.

Every night additional dead scholars showed up, until there were more than twenty creatures attending Hu Moon. They resembled men and women of past eras, dressed in garments that had been out of style for centuries in the pangalac urban worlds. They stood around in knots, talking to each other. The largest clump always formed across the perimeter from Hu Moon, who spoke with as much animation as any of the others. If they'd had glasses to hold, and plastic plates with toothpick food, the gathering might have been mistaken for a faculty cocktail party.

Maybe not. Watching, I thought I detected a kind of hungry watchfulness among the dead scholars who were not at that moment speaking to Hu Moon, as if their conversations were nothing more than window-dressing. I have no imagination, as I've mentioned so many times, at such tedious length. So perhaps this perception was accurate.

The scholars drifted away as the dawn approached, and I could see Hu Moon making gestures of entreaty as the last of them left. When she came in, she was exhausted but feverishly happy; she spoke to me as little as possible, but she was polite. She continued to shake her head at my concerns.

«Don't care, Leeson.» She smiled. «They may be monsters. People certainly called them monsters. People were jealous. Brilliant people get that a lot.»

«But,» I said. «If they're not real, then they're just you. You're just talking to yourself.»

«Then I'm better company than I ever knew,» she said, and would hear no more.

After a few days, Hu Moon moved Dueine out of the quarters they'd shared since the expedition's beginning, and into my cabin. Hu Moon reassigned me to Jang's small utilitarian cabin. I wasn't unhappy with this move, because now I had immediate access to Jang's video surveillance of the site, using a holobank that took up one entire wall of the sleeping cubicle. I could watch the creatures in the ruins without risk.

This rapidly lost its appeal. The brutality of the life there grew much worse at close range. I began to see the goblins kill the dead scholars, a particularly ugly sight, since the scholars could put up no effective resistance. Worse yet, the goblins took their time disassembling their victims. The scholars screamed in an entirely human manner and looked like human beings inside; I saw blood and entrails and bone. The illusion was maintained until the creature died, at which point the body parts melted into a homogenous mass of white stone that frothed away into the ground.

I helped Dueine carry her few things to her new home. Tears spilled silently down her cheeks as we moved through the ship's corridors, but I could think of no comforting words.

After we'd put her things down on the bed, Dueine turned to me, still sniffling. «I don't understand what's going on with Moon. How can she be so... involved... with those creatures? Why doesn't she see what they are?»

I shook my head and edged toward the door. «People see what they want to see, sometimes,» I said.

Dueine sobbed. «I never thought she'd do such a thing,» she said, waving her hands, a gesture that seemed to take in both her tear-stained face and the little cabin.

«People are unpredictable,» I muttered as I left.

«Not you,» Dueine said, somewhat unkindly. I guess I knew what she meant, but I think she was wrong.

When one night, Hu Moon did not put on her armor, and left her gun in the ship, I suspected her death was near. But the creatures did not seize her immediately, as I had assumed they would. Maybe they were more intelligent than I'd thought. If they'd crossed the perimeter boundary to take her, the guns might have destroyed at least a few of them. In any case, they continued to meet her at the perimeter, and she continued to be entranced by them, for the next three nights.

On that night, when she went out, Dueine followed her. I watched the young woman go with no particular sense of foreboding. Still, Dueine was not wearing armor, and I had undertaken to fulfill as best I could Jang's security obligations. So I put on my own shell, took my smartgun and went after her.

I was too late to do anything useful. As I came from the ship, I could see the two women in their silvery shipsuits, silhouetted against the dark mass of the crowd. They appeared to be arguing vehemently. There was much arm-waving and foot-stamping. I quickened my pace, but it happened before I could reach them.

Just as I approached the perimeter Hu Moon stepped across the line, throwing her arms around two of the creatures, as if in joyful greeting. They urged her away from the line, while other scholars closed ranks tightly around her. A murmur of conversation rose higher and now it sounded like the buzzing of insects. My view was obscured, but evidently Hu Moon sensed some wrongness and began to struggle. Perhaps she felt stone under her arms rather than aging human flesh. I saw her try to push the creatures away, to no effect at all.

Dueine very foolishly ran after her. I shouted, «No!» but she didn't listen.

The goblins burst from the ground like reanimated corpses in some old horror drama. They seized Dueine by the arms and legs and hair, and she had hardly time to scream once before they pulled her into pieces.

Shock slowed me, but I finally got the smartgun up and pulled the trigger. My first burst caught several of the ones who had killed her. As they shattered, they dropped the pieces of her body they clutched, but others took them up and darted away. In an instant, the ground was empty except for Dueine's torso, still pulsing blood, a shining black pool in the security lights. The smartgun was still bucking in my hands and I forced myself to release the trigger.

Hu Moon began to scream. I turned to see her, still surrounded by the crowd of dead scholars, struggling ineffectually with them. They'd taken her to a spot of soft soil, a filled-in test excavation. So many creatures clustered around her that I could see her only occasionally, but she seemed to be slowly sinking into the ground. I suddenly understood that the creatures were taking her down into the soil, fingers pulling back the dirt and working her down slowly into its grip. I wondered if other creatures were down in the soil, pulling at her flesh; her screams now had a terrible fearful edge. I tried to shoot but the smartgun was silent, evidently unwilling to fire in the direction of a living crew member.

Before I could decide if I were brave enough to leave the perimeter, Hu Moon's face slid beneath the soil and her screams stopped.

The creatures melted after her in tumbling haste and were gone before I could pull the trigger.

I stood guard over Dueine's meager remains until daybreak. As the surviving member of the original expedition, I now had direct access to the ship's information systems. I read Dueine's will. She had specified cremation, so without any formality, I put her body into the ship's mass converter.

If the ship ever lifts again, her atoms will be scattered among the stars. I hoped she might find this acceptable. She was the only expedition member besides Jang who treated me with kindness.

After Hu Moon's ambiguous disappearance and Dueine's death, I spent more time sitting by the perimeter in the evening, watching the goblins and warriors at their inexplicable activities. One night a goblin came up to the perimeter and sat on a stone no more than two meters from me. It seemed to be wearing a hat made of human skin, poorly tanned. I couldn't tell which of my former companions had contributed the basic material of the hat, though it didn't seem to bear Hu Moon's distinctive tattoos. My first impulse was to bring up the gun I always carried and destroy the thing.

But I didn't, partly because its face seemed a bit less malignant than the faces I remembered from other nights. It still had that intensely knowing look, but the tiny features were almost human now.

«Yes, we've changed,» it said in quietly conversational tones. Its voice was an odd synthesis of Irvane's and Dueine's; it spoke the same Dilvermoon dialect that we had used on the ship. I was as surprised as I would have been had the ground suddenly spoken. The goblin shook its head ruefully. «I'm tinned, by my lights. Took in too much weakness. An impulse that didn't pay off, killing the unformed one. She gave us nothing but softness.»

«Who?» I asked, as if this made perfect sense.

«The young woman, Dueine. There was nothing to her. We are diluted.» It sighed. «So we will die.»

I could think of nothing to say, though my fear of the creature had subsided, and curiosity gripped me.

«And I'm curious about you,» it said.

Apparently it was completely at home in my mind. My skin crawled. «About me?» I said. «What could be interesting about me?»

It smiled, showing small white teeth. «You are different. Give me the phrase... yes...'terra incognita.'

«An unformed shape, a blank slate. We can't see the meaning of your dreams, Leeson. If you have any.»

«No?» It was still a shock to hear my name from the mouth of such a dreadful creature

«No. So, what manner of being are you?» it asked politely.

«Just a man,» I said, though what I thought was: but once I was an artist.

That's what I was always thinking. Some people hear music playing in their heads. I hear that terrible regretful phrase... once I was an artist.

«An artist, eh?» It leaned toward me. «Tell me about artists.»

I considered responding on the most concrete level– some artists daub color onto substrates, some chisel stone, some make sounds, some tell stories.

But I attempted a higher level of abstraction. «Artists make new things from within.» I shrugged. «Difficult, perhaps, to explain.»

«Not at all,» it said smoothly. «We too are artists of a sort, except that our creations are derived from others.»

«So, what manner of creature are you?» I asked.

It shrugged. «You know the basics. We take our forms from your imaginings.»

«Irvane imagined you?»

«That was my beginning, this time. Sad sad that we took the girl. So soft. Our enemies will smell it on us and destroy us all.» Its face sagged into despairing lines. «And no help from you. No one would eat such a blankness as you. Instant cessation, that would be.»

An idea was coming to me, slowly. «You want only the dreadful forms? Never the beautiful ones?»

«You're understanding now,» it said, approvingly. «It's our nature to take terrible shapes, to struggle with our generation, to pit our monstrousnesses against one another, until only the strongest and most cruel is left.»

I shook my head. «You'll all die but one?» I suppose it was my loneliness that made it seem as though I spoke with a real person.

«Of this cluster, only one will survive, when all is done.» It straightened its leathery hat. «But perhaps then one of the old ones will come out from under the mountains, and eat me.»

«You think you'll be the survivor?» I was fascinated. It was as Jang had said, it was like being in a fairy tale, one in which an evil troll sat beside me and said wonderfully strange things. For the moment I almost forgot Irvane's ravaged body and the way Dueine had come apart in their hands.

It sighed. «No, no. Not really. I spoke from simple bravado. The girl's softness... it has finished me.»

A time passed and we watched a pair of skelt fighters standing in the light of the moons. They seemed in no great hurry to address each other.

The goblin snarled soundlessly at them, its small soft lips wrinkling back. «One of them will live to the end. We cannot stand against them. The tattooed woman's own are thinkers, not fighters, and we kill them easily when we catch them. You'll have no issue, Leeson, since you have a broken mind. Soon I will be gone back, no more to feel the moonlight on my face.»

«Gone back to what?» I asked.

«Gone back to the soil in tatters. The cool soil. All my brothers and sisters,» it answered sadly. «Someday perhaps to live again, when next we have visitors.»

I was curious. «Is that where you go when the sun rises?»

«Yes, yes, into the ground or the caves. The caves are good because we remain active and can work at our schemes for dominance, but the ground is comforting, all that cool soil pressing against me, motionless. At peace.» The goblin's tiny face melted with pleasant recall, or so it seemed.

«Who are the 'old ones'?» I wondered.

«Our successes. Our terminal forms. The product of our struggle. Yes, when they become too crafty to waste themselves against other old ones even more treacherous, they go under the mountains and hide. Once in a great while an old one will come out and attack another. More frequently they come forth and eat an incomplete cluster. Like this one.» And the goblin made an expansive gesture with his long knotty arm, taking in the ruins where the monsters went about their business.

It looked at me, its bright wise eyes twinkling with malice. «I would kill you for the useless thing you are,» it said cheerfully. «I could reach across the line and twist off your head, quick as picking an apple. But it would surely shorten my own life, such as it is.»

I was conscious of wary relief. «Why?» I asked.

«You're a nothing, to us,» it said. «No dreams worth stealing. You are completely safe. You could walk through the ruins naked and soaked with blood and nothing would touch you.» It grinned at me. «Tell me what was done to you.»

I rose from my seat and brought up my gun.

«Wait,» it said. It raised both hands and I noticed that the fingers were inhumanly long. «I'll tell you one more story, then I'll leave you in peace.

«A wealthy family stopped to picnic here in the ruins once,» it said.

«It was a disaster for the units that came upon them first. Not one of them, neither mother nor father nor baby, hated anything. Can you imagine? And what did they dream? The father sometimes dreamed of other women, though his primary affection was for the mother, whom he prized. Soon he was knee-deep in doting concubines. By an unfortunate coincidence, the mother was also an admirer of beautiful women. No conflict! The baby? Well cared for and content.»

«What happened?»

«Oh, for many years they lived an idyllic life, the two of them and their lovers, and as the baby grew he found many good friends. Then the old one from the colony came out and took them all. Took their machines under the mountain for toys.» The goblin shook its thick body. «That old one... oh, now, that's something you don't want to meet.»

It rose and looked over its shoulder, where vague shapes drifted in through the broken walls. «I sense that it's time to hide,» it said. «I want to live as long as I can.»

«Wait,» I said, an idea coming to me. «Are you saying that you don't always take violent shapes?»

«You have so many questions,» it said. «Ask one more, if you like, and then I must go.»

«Why do you kill your creators?» I asked. «Why not let them live? There must have been more to Irvane than you.»

«Death is our mordant,» it said. «We're transient without it; the death of our creators fixes us in our forms until we die ourselves. Don't your people have a saying that you can't be a man until your father is dead?» It giggled unpleasantly.

«Do your people have sayings of your own?» I wondered. «Or are you all just puppets, made from the imaginations of real persons?»

Anger knotted the tiny features. Its hands hooked into claws and it leaned toward me, startling me. My finger twitched on the trigger and the goblin was knocked back and shattered into fragments.

Its head remained intact for a moment, and it mouthed silent curses at me, until it suddenly sagged and melted into the ground, a tangle of squirming white shapes.

None of the creatures approached me again. But an idea stayed with me.

I searched Jang's old cabin and found his stash of cannabis. I chose a pipe of living stone from the catalog of artifacts. I permanently disabled the ship's drive, in case I become disoriented when the nanomonitor in my brain starts to drift.

And to show my resolve.

I smoke now twice a night, primarily for the act's symbolic import, but I have convinced myself that I feel a very subtle change in myself. Perhaps it's only a twinge of hope. One evening I fell asleep sitting by the perimeter, amazingly enough, and had another dream of Suhaili. When I woke suddenly and looked about, I thought that the ground on the far side of the perimeter had shifted in some nearly indetectable manner.

Someday soon, I'll see the ground twitch, and white stone will move toward me. I believe this firmly.

I know I have to cleanse myself of all my hates, and all my bitterness. I have to remake myself, I have to learn to dream deep dreams again. Every afternoon, I watch the scenes from the colony's stack, with all the ugly parts removed, so that I can see the colonists living their quiet and beautiful lives. I've come to know many of the faces as well as if they belonged to living friends.

I've almost stopped watching the monsters at their play, though I occasionally look out to see if any new ones might have miraculously appeared. If that happens, I suppose I've made a mistake.

I spend a goodly amount of time maintaining the ship's security perimeter, lest an old one come to cut short my experiment.

Months may pass before they send a ship to investigate our disappearance. Years, perhaps. Many years.

I may be inviting madness and death, but since I cannot really imagine these things, the risk seems acceptable. I think of what I might gain, not what I might lose, because I have already lost everything that meant anything to me.

If I'm given enough time and enough grace, I might see Suhaili the Pipemaker and her people rise again from the stones.