He dived after it and trapped it in his mandibles, and bore it to Byra in triumph.
Standing by as she inspected it under the microscope, he heard her say irritably, “Stop fidgeting, young’un! You look as though a mustiq got under your mantle … Oh, this is even more ridiculous than the last one! I don’t see how it can survive, let alone reproduce itself!”
He scarcely noticed the last comment. A mustiq under his mantle? Yes, that was a little like it. He’d been twitching without realizing until he had his attention drawn to it. He was pulsating out of rhythm with himself; instead of the normal ratios between mantle-ripple, gut-shift, breath-drawing, ichor-peristalsis and eye-flick which he was accustomed to, in the perfect proportions of bass, third, fifth, seventh and octave, he was shuddering as though about to burst.
Having his maw empty for so long, for the first time in his life, was proving to be a very odd experience indeed.
Yet if hunger were the sole explanation (and surely he hadn’t gone without for long enough?)—
Oh, NO!
POISONED???
He peeled apart from himself, much like the brollicans that teachers on Voosla grew excited about when they chanced across a shoal of them so large the city had no time to eat the lot before a few could be salvaged for educational purposes. For scores-of-scores of years they had been providing real-time evidence for symbiosis, the phenomenon that underlay the folk’s modern predicament.
Coevolution … said something from the deep red level of his consciousness, but everyone knew that that level didn’t deal in speech, only in hunger and breeding-need and the repair of vital organs.
(But who had told him that was true? Maybe someone would come along to tell him different, like Thilling! Maybe the exercises she had promised him, concerning dark-use, didn’t refer only to outside-dark but inside-dark as well …)
In the distance, though very close in time, like right now:
“Help!” (It was Byra’s voice.) “Drotninch, Thilling, Phrallet, anybody! Awb’s gone dreamish!”
Dreamish? Me? Me…?
But he didn’t know who he was any longer. There wasn’t a “myself” controlling the physical envelope known as Awb. There was a muddle of memory and imagination, a chaotic slew of information and sensory input, and what trace of identity did remain—thanks to his having been budded on a small but wealthy city, where no one in living memory had gone dreamish through simple hunger—was capable of no more than observation: as it were, “So this is what must have happened to our poor ancestors who multiplied themselves without making provision for proper nourishment! I’m amazed they ever clawed their way back out of the mental swamp they fell in, regardless of Gveest’s best efforts, or the Jingfired’s!”
Then even that last vestige of himself dissolved, and his pith started to react as though he were his own remotest forebear, assailed by predatory gigants and striking out at random in the faint hope that at least his body might block one monster’s maw and choke it to death.
It took three of them to subdue his violent flailing.
Late that dark Thilling lay in a tree-crotch well away from the dam, which her images had convinced her was the chief source of danger, while the scientists wrangled among themselves. Awb had been temporarily quieted; Lesh had dispatched two of her assistants to find fruit and funqi from which nourishing juices could be extracted, at a safe distance from the lake, and herself administered a calmative from the first-aid pack she had brought. It was to be hoped that his youth and slightness of build accounted for his extreme vulnerability to—to whatever had afflicted him. At any rate the rest of them seemed to be in fair shape, with the exception, Thilling reflected cynically, of Phrallet, who was on the verge of hysteria. She kept saying over and over, “We must get out of here! We must go back at once! Who knows what damage is being wrought in our very pith? My pads are still hurting, you know!”
And when she found her companions ignoring that line of argument, she tried cajolement: “If only for the sake of my youngest budling, we must go back! Oh, I know I’m sometimes hard on him, but really I do care for him, and if he dies because of this…”