* * * * *
Webber opened a hatch in the side of the cabin. Light poured in. It had
to be sunlight, Kieran knew, but it was a queer color, a sort of tawny
orange that carried a pleasantly burning heat. He got loose with Paula
helping him and tottered to the hatch. The air smelled of clean
sun-warmed dust and some kind of vegetation. Kieran climbed out of the
flitter, practically throwing himself out in his haste. He wanted solid
ground under him, he didn't care whose or where.
And as his boots thumped onto the red-ochre sand, it occurred to him
that it had been a very long time since he had had solid ground
underfoot. A very long time indeed--
His insides knotted up again, and this time it was not seasickness but
fear, and he was cold all through again in spite of the hot new sun.
He was afraid, not of the present, nor of the future, but of the past.
He was afraid of the thing tagged Reed Kieran, the stiff blind voiceless
thing wheeling its slow orbit around the Moon, companion to dead worlds
and dead space, brother to the cold and the dark.
He began to tremble.
Paula shook him. She was talking but he couldn't hear her. He could only
hear the rush of eternal darkness past his ears, the thin squeak of his
shadow brushing across the stars. Webber's face was somewhere above him,
looking angry and disgusted. He was talking to Paula, shaking his head.
They were far away. Kieran was losing them, drifting away from them on
the black tide. Then suddenly there was something like an explosion, a
crimson flare across the black, a burst of heat against the cold.
Shocked and wild, the physical part of him clawed back to reality.
Something hurt him, something threatened him. He put his hand to his
cheek and it came away red.
Paula and Webber were yanking at him, trying to get him to move.
* * * * *
A stone whizzed past his head. It struck the side of the flitter with a
sharp clack, and fell. Kieran's nervous relays finally connected. He
jumped for the open hatch. Automatically he pushed Paula ahead of him,
trying to shield her, and she gave him an odd startled look. Webber was
already inside. More stones rattled around and one grazed Kieran's
thigh. It hurt. His cheek was bleeding freely. He rolled inside the
flitter and turned to look back out the hatch. He was mad.
"Who's doing it?" he demanded.
Paula pointed. At first Kieran was distracted by the strangeness of the
landscape. The flitter crouched in a vastness of red-ochre sand laced
with some low-growing plant that shone like metallic gold in the
sunlight. The sand receded in tilted planes lifting gradually to a range
of mountains on the right, and dropping gradually to infinity on the
left. Directly in front of the flitter and quite literally a stone's
throw away was the beginning of a thick belt of trees that grew beside a
river, apparently quite a wide one though he could not see much but a
tawny sparkling of water. The course of the river could be traced clear
back to the mountains by the winding line of woods that followed its
bed. The trees themselves were not like any Kieran had seen before.
There seemed to be several varieties, all grotesque in shape and exotic
in color. There were even some green ones, with long sharp leaves that
looked like spearheads.
Exotic or not, they made perfectly adequate cover. Stones came whistling
out of the woods, but Kieran could not see anything where Paula was
pointing but an occasional shaking of foliage.
"Sakae?" he asked.
Webber snorted. "You'll know it when the Sakae find us. They don't throw
stones."
"These are the humans," Paula said. There was an indulgent softness in
her voice that irritated Kieran.
"I thought they were our dear little friends," he said.
"You frightened them."
"_I_ frightened them?"
"They've seen the flitter before. But they're extremely alert to modes
of behavior, and they knew you weren't acting right. They thought you
were sick."
"So they tried to kill me. Nice fellows."
"Self-preservation," Webber said. "They can't afford the luxury of too
much kindness."
"They're very kind among themselves," Paula said defensively. To Kieran
she added, "I doubt if they were trying to kill you. They just wanted to
drive you away."
"Oh, well," said Kieran, "in that case I wouldn't dream of disappointing
them. Let's go."