Mitigan reached down and picked something up from beside a tentacle. He held it out to Lutha.
A fragment of striped fabric. Her eyes refused to see it.
“This your kid’s?” he asked.
“Maybe this shaggy picked it up from outside the cavern. Leely might have lost it there.” Snark said it. She didn’t believe it, but she said it because believing anything else was insane.
Lutha took the scrap and turned it in her hands. On one side was a series of circular impressions, made up of small, individual eaten or burned dots.
Mitigan had already rolled the tentacle with his boot heel, exposing the line of circular structures beneath, made up of individual pores. He took the scrap and held it close. They matched.
“Can’t get hurt,” whispered Leelson, his eyes on Lutha. “Can’t get lost.”
He was quoting Saluez, of course, but his eyes questioned Lutha. What did Lutha know?
Lutha told herself she didn’t know a damned thing!
“He’s pure poison to these,” said Mitigan thoughtfully.
“And to Kachis,” Leelson mused. “That’s why they died.”
Lutha screamed at him. “You don’t think … ?”
“Hush.” He gripped her arm, glancing upward. “Don’t yell. I don’t know what I’m thinking. Not yet. Keep your voice down.”
They stayed where they were for a few moments, watching the shaggies to see if Lutha had alerted them. Evidently not. Even the one she had wounded had returned to its place and was fishing, unconcernedly.
They went in single file along the limp body, for the first time getting an accurate idea of its size. Even flattened as it was, the creature had an ominous bulk. Snark knelt beside the mantle and began cutting at a puffy area, which collapsed with a whoosh of escaping gas and a momentary stink.
“Hydrogen,” murmured Snark, carving off a piece of the body before turning to the tentacles. “I’m betting it uses bioelectrics to separate hydrogen from salt water. The analyzer in the lab at the camp will figure it out.”
“Jellyfish,” said the ex-king, who at that moment came from behind a brush pile and wandered over to them. “It’s a huge, aerial jellyfish.”
“I thought they got you,” Leelson remarked to the ex-king.
Jiacare shook his head slowly. “No, actually I dallied a bit behind you when you all went down to the shore. You seemed to be moving rather precipitously. And then, of course, you were making a foolhardy amount of noise.”
He nudged the dead or dying shaggy with one toe. “What killed it? It’s too far up the slope to have washed in.”
Leelson handed him the scrap of cloth; Snark displayed her flesh samples; there was a consequent babble babble. The ex-king looked shocked, then intrigued.
Lutha refused to join in the talk. What they said wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Leelson said. “Evolution takes countless generations to come up with things like this. Poisoned leaves that dissuade leaf-eating insects. Thorny seedpods that are not eaten, allowing them to germinate. Poisoned flesh, brightly colored, that warns off predation.”
“Might not be poison,” said the ex-king. “Might be … oh, a virus.”
Lutha blurted, “Leely’s been examined by experts. He doesn’t have a virus.”
“He doesn’t have a virus harmful to him, you mean,” said the ex-king. “I doubt anyone looked for viruses harmful to other things. Especially exotic things.”
Lutha admitted to herself he was probably right. Why would they? Leelson had hired people to analyze Leely, and she’d fought them every step of the way. She’d let them inventory Leely’s genetic material, but she’d stopped there. No one had done a complete cell inventory.
“How could he have a virus I don’t have?” she demanded. “The two of us are always together.”
Leelson shushed her. “Leely went off alone and touched them. You didn’t. Maybe you have it, too, and don’t know it.”
“Fine,” she snarled. “Next you’d be suggesting I be staked out as bait, just to find out!”
In this mood of mixed apprehension and annoyance, she followed the others to the camp, where Snark put the specimens into the analyzers, and then back to the rock pile. They had been under cover only briefly when the Rottens returned. Everyone but Lutha went to spy upon them, but she remained in their sleeping chamber where Saluez and Leely were sleeping. Though Saluez drooled unconsciously, Leely did not. He did not respond to the presence of the Rottens in any way. He just went on quietly sleeping while Lutha bent her head over the sand and waited for it to be over.