World's End

Page 71

"Why?" Spadrin said.

"They pick things up."

"There's a man out there too," I said. My eyes had finally found a human form among the stalklike limbs and bulbous glittering eyes.

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Ang looked up and out again. He started to frown, and then he pushed past Spadrin and disappeared into the back of the rover. When he came forward again he had three stun rifles. He handed us each one. "You know how to use these?"

Spadrin laughed. I nodded once.

The feel of the gun in my hand was like water in the throat of a man dying of thirst. I weighed its balance, checked the charge almost automatically. When I looked up again, Spadrin was watching me. Ang opened the door.

As we climbed down from the cab the natives shuffled back with the sound of dry branches clattering. There

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JOAN D. VINGE

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were maybe a dozen of them, and they were larger than

I'd expected--probably taller than an average human if they stood upright. They hunched over, resting on long, fragile arms that looked like bones wrapped in bark. I had the sudden peculiar thought that the arms should have been wings. They did have fingers, spindly twigs that were constantly sifting the crusty soil, picking things up for brief scrutiny and dropping them again. An unreadable proboscis of wrinkled gray-brown was all the face I could make out on any of them. They wore clothing after a fashion--filthy rags hard to distinguish from their desiccated flesh, and an assortment of small bags and pouches that hung against their chests. The human who stood among them wore rags, too, and carried pouches and a gnarled staff. If he wanted to look like one of them, he was succeeding. Why in the name of a thousand gods he would, I couldn't begin to imagine.

The natives came forward again as Ang made a motion;

the human moved with them. Ang had dropped a sack of his own on the ground and pulled it open, never taking his eyes off of them. The sack was full of bits of broken equipment, spools of wire, globs of melted glass.

There were stones also, bright and peculiar ones, probably every bit as worthless as the rest of it.

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