Floyd Largent is a former archaeologist who never woke a sleeping god or unearthed an ancient evil (alas). In the past year, he has published or had accepted for publication six poems and 30 short stories.
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Spear is so hungry his stomach is starting to wonder if his throat has been cut. The game in this New Place is unusually thin on the ground, and the game birds, though plentiful, are fast and elusive. The tribe has begun blaming him for leading them here, so he has been giving almost everything he kills to the women to distribute. It is his right to claim a hunter's share, but he has not been doing that. A smart man knows when discretion is the better part of valor.
Nor was it his leadership, in truth, that brought him to this alien place where the air is so thick it is hard to breathe sometimes, and dust hangs heavy in the air. He is convinced of that. The rumblings and bright lights of the fortnight before, and that awful reek in the air, must have had something to do with it. No one has been able to find a way home, either, despite many attempts.
Not that everything about the New Place is bad. Nowhere else have the People ever found so much toolstone just lying around unused, as if no one else lives here; and having seen no people but his own since they came here, Spear is beginning to believe that this is, in fact, the case. Then there is the metal, in bright sheets and oddly rounded outcroppings; pliable like copper, but mostly gray-white rather than orange. It too lies around for the taking, and the shamans have already begun experimenting with working it and trying to see how long it will hold an edge. The results are promising when it is folded and pressed many times. The air is so thick that actual hammering is nearly impossible.
He glances up at the familiar Shimmer that roofs the sky above; at least that is the same here. As he thinks this, from the corner of his eye he sees one of the things the children have been calling "dust bugs" scuttle out from under a leaf, staring at him fearlessly with its stalked eyes, clacking its little claws together. Spear is not picky. He scoops it up, moving as fast as the thick air will allow, and eats it. His teeth are crunching its sweetness before it knows it has been caught. Fortunately, he was so quick and smooth in his lunge that he stirred up very little of the dust, God be praised. The stuff tends to hang in the air for tens of minutes before it settles.
He thinks of the brace of fine birds he handed the women an hour ago back at camp, and his stomach rumbles. Well, at least it has something to work on now.
He turns back to his work. At the moment, he is squatting beside an outcropping of transparent stone. It reminds him of mica, only not flaky; it has the feel and taste of obsidian, but not the color. The stone of the outcrop is slick, almost polished, though the piece he is working now has an odd patterning of bumps on one side. It took him forever to break off this chunk. Because the air’s thickness slows movement, it was almost impossible to use his hammerstone on the rock. Once he had the chunk off, though, things became much easier. The circular blank he holds now is of an ideal size, and it flakes better than any stone he has ever worked, better even than chalcedony or the finest flint. All he has to do is rough it out a bit with a hardwood baton, which does not require the broad movements that are so annoyingly slowed down by the thick air, and then pressure flake the edges to his heart's content.
Pressure flaking is the same no matter how thick the air. He drapes a thick piece of leather on his thigh, lays the preform on it, and uses a stout, pointed piece of bone to drive small sharpening flakes off one edge. Once he finishes that edge, he flips it over and presses flakes off the opposite side; then he works his way around all sides of the biface until he has a serviceable (and very sharp) ulu, which he slots into a wooden handle and ties tight with sinew.
He gazes at his handiwork with pride, noting how the light winks off and bends through it. This is true clearstone, transparent and relatively rare, even in this world of plentiful raw materials. He likes it much better than the green, brown, and black toolstone some of his fellow warrior-hunters prefer. It is all much the same, he supposes, but this transparent kind… it seems cleaner, purer somehow.
He stands, nodding, and slips the new knife into a semicircular sheath at his waist. It fits just right. Now to the hunt.
* * *
Half an hour later, Spear spies a cloud of dust in the distance, and his heart leaps! Could it be a wallower? Jek One-Eye killed one of the oddly slick-skinned beasts last week, and it fed the tribe for days. The meat was unusually pale and bloodless, tender and juicy, like nothing they had ever tasted... even though they had to eat it raw. Fire does not work here, or at least nothing they have tried so far can make it work. They have not even seen a fire-flint in weeks, and the thick air immediately smothers any sparks struck from plain flint. It is like trying to light urine.
He eases behind one of the outcroppings of coarse-grained gray rock that the shaman Amia claims is a made thing, like the toolstone. Perhaps there was some civilization here that collapsed long ago; some said Spear's had, many generations back. Spear does not care. If he cannot eat something or use it to get his family something to eat, it is useless to him.
Yes, it is a wallower! He watches the thing scuttle through the dust, looking for bugs and refuse, like some legless pig. Indeed, it looks something like a pig... though he hardly knows how it could move, except that the air here makes things almost buoyant. Then too, it is a slippery beast, like a snake; but it does have a few odd spiny legs far up on its sides that it sometimes uses to stir the dust, and for defense. Stupid Calva got poked in the arm with one while cleaning Jek's kill and was sickened nigh unto death before recovering.
Well, one learns the hard way. Especially Calva.
The wallower is an ugly thing: no neck, wide-mouthed with ridiculous fleshy growths hanging from its lips, and rough plates containing tiny sharp teeth in its jaws, rather than proper incisors and molars. It is as round-eyed and stupid as the birds.
It occurs to Spear in a flash of insight that perhaps a wallower is a kind of flightless bird!
But that is an epiphany to be considered another time; more to the point, it is a fat bird that cannot or will not take flight. He has a brand new knife made of the best stone he has ever worked — and this bird-brained not-pig could feed his clan long enough for him and the other hunters to find something more plentiful to fill their stomachs with, and perhaps even a deep, fertile valley where the fast-growing ydrill seeds can take root. So far, the territory they have explored is too mountainous, too close to the Shimmer and the bright, searing airlessness that lies beyond.
Ha, the brainless wonder is coming near! Grinning in anticipation, Spear climbs to the top of the outcrop and waits for it to approach. To draw it near, he quietly regurgitates the remains of the dust bug and lets the mess drop to the dusty loam. The wallower sniffs, intrigued by the carrion scent, and approaches. Spear crouches, knife in hand, and waits...
He is actually bending his knees, preparing to leap, when Cucuy, the same misbegotten goddess of perversity that drew them to this hell, intervenes. A shadow looms suddenly, slanting through the Shimmer; then there comes a mighty crash as something shatters the sky above and drifts slowly to the ground, trailing tremulous globules, no doubt of something awful, that flee for the Shimmer as it rumbles and dies. The Shimmer heals instantly, as it always does — but then there comes an uneven splattering like hot grease on a cook-stone as something dimples the Shimmer from above, as if repeatedly trying but unable to come through.
The wallower, of course, is gone like a bowshot, faster than Spear can run. Obviously, this bird is not flightless after all. Spear screams in frustration and slashes the air with his knife, his useless, unblooded knife —!
A moment later, an errant breeze brings a stink that makes him gag: a smell like urine, only a thousand times worse! Kye-ee! It is bad enough that normal urine hangs in the air like ammonia farts in this horrible place — but now something above the Shimmer has thrown a rock at him and is pissing into the world!
That thought brings him up sharp. Something is pissing into the world? How is that possible? There is nothing above the Shimmer but outer space and heat and the sun! But — could something actually live there, at least in this New Place? Is it god or devil? Is he under attack? If so, what can he do about it?
He looks up slowly, and realizes that the shadow of the thing is enormous, a good eight times his length...
His stomach rumbles, and he wonders if the monster is edible.
He jumps off the outcropping toward the enormous rock, nearly his size, that the monster threw at him. As he lands next to it, catching himself on both feet and his free hand, he sees that it is in fact a mass of toolstone, of the brown kind with the leaf-like rind. The rinds are bright and useless, but what they hide... hmmm. It is a dark brown. Perhaps brown enough to dim the light enough for him to see above the Shimmer?
It has fallen against one of the gray concretions. He knows from experience that this toolstone is like a bubble, just a thin shell over hollowness. The side parts make poor tools — they are too thin and curved — but they can be used. If he presses with all his strength against the stone, maybe he can break it; if he can, maybe he can make himself a pair of dark spectacles, similar to the clear ones the traveling tinker ground from rock crystal for Amia last year. Maybe he can see clearly what is above, pestering him, and see if it might, perhaps, become prey.
He is still pondering this when he hears another, lesser crash, and a snake floats down from the sky, wiggling at him!
Spear blinks in disbelief. Maybe the urine-stink in the water has clouded his mind, like the fermented berry mash Amia makes in the fall. How could a snake fall down from the sky and just float there in front of him, wiggling so enticingly? He likes snake as much as the next man, but this seems far too convenient. And besides, something thin and hard to see trails out of the snake's rear and back up into the sky, something that sways like a vine in the breeze, something like... a thread?
What in the Seven Hells...? Is this some kind of disguised spider?
Well, Spear Birdkiller might be reckless, but no one has ever called him stupid. He backs away, and goes to work on the toolstone.
An exhausting two hours later, he sits back on a rock and peers at his handiwork. The stone had taken forever to break, and then it took a full hour just to choose decent flakes and shape them into roundness. They are a bit convex, but he can see through them dimly. So he slices up a precious square of leather and uses the strips to fashion a kind of crude goggles he can tie over his eyes. Hmmm, he thinks, that worked even better than I expected.
The sun is still high and bright, and the snake still floats a tantalizing few feet away. It is dead now, and the smell is driving him mad with hunger. While he worked, he watched a half-dozen of the thin, deep-chested birds, the ones he has never been able to bring down because they fly too high and fast, hover in the air and peck at it. Twice they had been yanked, shrieking, through the Shimmer. They hadn’t come back.
So. The moment of truth has arrived. Not more than 16 body-lengths ahead, the ground arcs up suddenly to meet the Shimmer, a typical abrupt edge of their New Place. But a bit more than eight body-lengths away, a pithy column slants down through the Shimmer, one end buried in the ground. He has had his eye on it for a while. Half an hour ago, an armored thing larger than him had trundled down the column out of the Shimmer. He thought it might be a machine, like the rusted ground cars abandoned on the weed-choked roads that Amia calls eyeways back home; but then it dove off to fall to the ground, and he saw the four taloned legs that powered it. This was some animal that lived at least part-time in outer space; no wonder it was armored. Said armor was half as thick as Spear's hand is long, so he knows he could never kill it alone.
Maybe it was a baby Space Monster; it certainly was not big enough to be the one that threw the rock and pissed at him earlier. Bastard. Will the Space Monster also be heavily armored? Is Spear on a fool's errand?
Too late to back out now.
Spear balances on the end of the column that pierces the soil, and slowly climbs the column into the sky. When the Shimmer is less than an arm's length away, he lifts a hand and pushes against it. To his surprise, it is soft and yielding, unlike the Shimmer back home. No wonder things can fall through it so easily. It takes a little effort, but his fingers push through... and he doesn’t die. His fingers feel desiccated and the sun burns them somewhat, but he can stand it for a little while.
He straps on his makeshift goggles; then, taking a deep, deep breath, he lifts his head above the Shimmer.
The heat and complete lack of air assault his senses. He can hear odd sounds, like rushing winds, and bug noises, and babbles almost like speech, but he has no idea what it all means. The lack of air is strangling; he cannot breathe, and his nose is so dry he smells nothing but pain. But his eyes: he can see easily through the brown glass. And sitting on something oddly like a warrior-hunter's chaise is the recumbent figure of a creature that looks almost like a giant person, except that the face is flat and noseless, with deep-sunk eyes and horrible tendrils waving in a flattened crescent above the mouth and in a fringe below it, and its skin is the pale color of a dead thing that has lain too long in the daylight.
And it doesn’t have any armor. In the gap between the tendrils on the bottom of its face, above something that looks like an appalling parody of clothing, there is a neck — a neck ripe and tender and pulsing with life, as he can see when he strains his vision. It looks edible, and he salivates. The vacuum immediately steals the moisture, bringing him back to his senses.
Spear slips beneath the Shimmer, back into the world he knows, his bowels loose and his entire body shaking. He takes a deep breath of clean, thick air, and realizes his nose is bleeding. He wonders about the pike the Space Monster held in its paws, and why it stares at the Shimmer — from above! — like a hunting shrike.
Then Spear understands. It is hunting the birds, too! The snake he saw, and the thread attached to its rear, and the yanking of the birds above the Shimmer... it is using something like Spear's bird-hunting gear, except that the Monster never has to move or chase the birds or try to bring them down with arrows. It has a clever way of luring them in, a shrewd way of taking advantage of the thick air it spurns. Obviously, this thing is a thinking being, like a person.
Too bad. His clan is starving.
And as clever as its bird-hunting way is, Spear Birdkiller has thought of a perfect way to take advantage of it. The thread has to be strong indeed to pull a bird right out of the sky. Is it strong enough to pull a Spear?
That remains to be seen.
* * *
Stupid Calva refuses to believe him, but Amia has blessed his effort, and Spear has brought with him eight warrior-hunters, including Jek, Sunstone, and Pellucid, who together have more hunting experience than the rest of the tribe put together. Plus, there are the boys who skulk along far enough back that they think their elders will not notice. They clearly do not know that Spear and all the rest did exactly the same when they were boys.
Scorpion has brought a rope eight body-lengths long, just in case the monster falls the wrong way and they have to haul it into the world. If indeed they can.
Today, as yesterday, a snake writhes in the air, writing smoky contrails with its blood, a fine thread trailing out of its rear into the sky and through the Shimmer, ha! Just as Spear said! Even Calva cannot gainsay him when one of the thin birds flies by and pecks hard at the snake, and the snake pecks back, and yanks the bird into the Shimmer! Its horrible scream still echoes when Spear says, "Stand ready."
They all draw their fine, new, sharp knives, and as soon as a new snake appears in the sky above, they act. Calva and Jek crouch and join hands; Spear puts a foot into the fleshy basket their fingers make, shouts "Now!" and they hurl him into the sky.
* * *
Ray-Paul Calbert don't have much to do since he retired and his dear wife Alma went on to her just reward, so he fishes. He been fishing in this spot ever' day for the past week, bringin' home enough bream and bass for dinner, with a mudcat here or a gaspergou there for variety. It’s been good for him, a balm for the soul to sit and catch fish for the pan, sometimes just drownin' worms and drowsin' for hours at a time. Today the cooler contains three hand-sized bream so far, and he don't worry none that the county says he shouldn't eat 'em, that Witchkill Reservoir’s been polluted by too much illegal dumpin' to be safe.
What do he care? He not gonna live much longer anyway. He can feel it in his gut.
When he gets a tug on the line almost right away after haulin' in that last bream, he’s a little surprised. There usually ain't this much action in this hidden corner of the lake. He yanks back to set the hook — and a ugly bronze thing like some terrible combination of toad and monkey erupts outta the water, landing on the end of his cane pole, where it clings with all four feet. Hell, he didn't realize the water were that polluted. Maybe someone really has been dumping nucular waste into Witchkill Creek, just like that fiery young senator on TV says.
Then he sees, to his shock, that the toad-monkey is wearing clothes: a leathery loincloth wrapped around its middle. And then he sees that it’s wearing goggles that look like they been made outta beer bottles, and it’s holdin' a glass knife twixt its rubbery lips. And then, as Ray-Paul stands up, it starts climbin' up the cane pole toward him like a little toad-monkey determined to get the coconut, only Ray-Paul the coconut today.
He has time to take one last swallow of beer, though most of it dribbles into his beard, then leans his head back and hunches forward a little, to make it easy for his little friend.
His gut ain't never failed him.
* * *
They do not need the rope. The Space Monster seems almost to welcome its death; all it takes is a swipe with the sharp edge of his knife to lay open the tender throat and bring the bright red flood forth, and then the Monster falls right into the sky, with Spear along for the ride.
After that it is almost anticlimactic. Spear swims down through the thick air to the ground, through and past the blood-cloud, and sends one of the lurking boys back to camp to get everyone else. This thing makes a wallower look like a dust bug, and they will have to eat and preserve as much of it as they can right away. He sets the other boys to protecting the carcass from wallowers and other scavenging birds and bugs, while he and the other men start slaughtering it. Stupid Calva is set to the task of gathering the cloth it wore as well as its skin, which will shelter and clothe the People for generations to come.
No one is as efficient as the People, and by the time the light dies, half the Monster has been removed and hauled away. The rest is gone by the next morning, for the People have wide round eyes and can see well in the dark, especially when their stomachs are full.
By then, the only traces remaining of Ray-Paul were a few beers, a Styrofoam container of dying worms, a small cooler containing a few fish, a battered tacklebox... and a broken cane pole floating fifty feet out in the lake. His disappearance was reported, of course. And once or twice a year after that, if the occasional lone fisherman disappeared, well — it was a big lake, and this was Witchkill after all, and people were always doing stupid things. Boaters were forever killing themselves in brainless accidents, and even they didn't always turn up, now did they?
For the People are crafty, and thrifty, and use every part of their prey; nothing goes to waste, and they have learned very well how to use what the Space Monsters just throw away. Since coming to this New Place, they have thrived like never before in their history; and they know, now, what that great artificial stone wall is at one end of the world, and new villages have sprung up at its base, in the deep valleys where the ydrill grows thick though the light is dim — waiting for the day when the Shimmer dances to a heavy, splattering assault, as the lights flash far above and bone-deep rumbles throb through the air, and the Space Monsters open wide the floodgates to release more air into the stream beyond — the stream that leads to the next air reservoir, eights of thousands of body-lengths downstream.
And truly then, perhaps, the meek will inherit the Earth, after they slither happily down the slimy slope of the dam to mark, for the Space Monsters, the beginning of...
THE END
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