[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

creak...
One of the burly men stood beside a stagelight and dropped a colored gel over the bulb. The stage
became green, dark and cold.
"From the north," the woman moaned, as if mourning. "It might have killed my husband. It wants to
kill _me_ and go home. A monster, a queen's own nightmare. Look upon it."
The door swung all the way, and within, restrained by iron bars, a cage within the crate, long thin
black legs, dozens of them, with red joints.
The round-faced woman leaned forward, eyes even wider. The audience fell silent. A chair leg
racketed on the floor, several feet shuffled. "Fate and Pneuma," said one voice.
"Hoping to kill us all," the woman on stage suggested dreamily.
Lights switched on overhead, bathing the cage in brighter green and yellow. The form in the cage
stirred, legs twitching. The woman pulled a large key on a brass ring from the folds of her dress, slipped it
into a prominent lock on the cage within the crate, turned the key, and pulled open the cage door with a
ghastly unoiled screech. The sailors in the first row of the theater pushed their chairs back with a clatter
until outthrust arms and legs from the people behind would let them push no farther.
"What would we do if they freely walked among us?" the woman asked, spinning out her story,
making herself a potential victim as the legs stretched reflexively across the stage toward her, flat
cup-claw feet spatting into the leaking brown liquid. One sailor, a young fellow not from the _Vigilant,_
bolted. Shankara looked after him and gave me a knowing smile.
The creature squeezed and squirmed slowly from its cage and stood in the sickly light, rising three
meters in height, gangly, loose. I tried to discern its shape in the glare: thick trunk or abdomen dragging,
thin upper body, disks half rotating at its shoulders, and emerging from the edges of the disks the long,
half limp legs. It had no head, but a long stalk pushed up from the trunk and arched over the form, and
from this hung two transparent globes -- eyes, perhaps -- that slowly rotated, black oblate pupils
absorbing the sight of the crowd. It sighed, thorax expanding alarmingly, then shivered its legs together.
The audience as one groaned and backed away, tables and chairs bunching, overturning.
The scion and the woman seemed to regard each other with equal detachment. "What is it you wish,
_monster?_" the woman asked coldly.
The form lifted its legs as if beckoning.
"_Me?_" the woman asked, voice rising to a kind of cheery glee. "_Me,_ as well as my husband?"
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
"Stop it!" shouted the man half seated in front of me. "For the love of God, it's just a scion! A silvan
child! Let it be!"
The woman ignored him. The audience had come here for rough entertainment; she was determined
to give it to them. The long pleats of her dress contained many things, apparently. She lowered one hand
gracefully and brought out a machete. "Which is it to be?" she asked us. "Revenge ... or forgiveness?
Respect, or anger given an edge?"
My own anger suddenly flared and I restrained myself with an effort. The woman's face fairly
glowed with enthusiasm. She seemed half committed to chopping the form to bits; in the cloud of rum, I
thought, _No act, this._ But the burly men emerged from the wings and restrained her, one grabbing the
arm with the machete, both bodily lifting her, suddenly rigid as a board. The slow spidery creature, left
alone on the stage, sighed, bunched its legs up and sidled back into its cage.
The stagehands returned without the woman and raised and locked the door of the crate, then
lowered the curtains. The audience sat stunned for a moment; _that was all? No exit music, no
announcements?_
Grumbling, disheartened, we passed through the glass doors to the bar. I stayed behind, stunned and
heartsick, slumped in my chair. Somehow, this seemed almost as wrong and perverse as the slaughter at
Moonrise.
The round-faced woman, Shift or Shirla, put aside her unfinished bowl of gruel and stood before the
stage and curtains. She wore a kerchief around her head topped with a small black hat. Her face seemed
childlike in the half light. She turned to Shankara. "What is it?" she asked.
"Nothing but a Tasman western scion," Shankara said, half in contempt, half in pity. "Not eastern.
Not from Baker. Probably from Kandinski's Zone. But I'm just guessing."
"We'll see more like that?" the woman asked distantly.
Shankara gave a brief, hollow laugh and looked at me with dark brown eyes. "Shocking, eh? We
live in the most boring zone on Lamarckia. We have to _import_ our monsters."
"It was wonderful," the round-faced woman said, and seemed genuinely to mean it. "Poor thing.
What does it do?"
"A mulcher, I'd guess," he said. "Something that cleans arborid roots and prepares soil. About as
dangerous as a cricket. I've served on merchant ships going to Tasman and seen stranger than that." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]