He wasn’t moving from where he stood, probably to avoid alarming her again. Nile went stroking back, stopped a few feet away, a little above him. The changed, ugly face turned toward her; otherwise he remained motionless. Armies of tiny luminous feeders darted about his trunklike legs, crept in the soft mud, swarming about the litter of a smashed shells, cracked carapaces and other remnants of their own ravenous feeding.
She studied him quickly, no longer repelled by what she saw. There were transparent horny sheaths over the eyes, bulging outward a little. She had them, too. The lids wouldn’t close over them, but there was no discomfort involved with that. Their outer ears were covered by a bone-hard growth like a thick, curved sausage. Whatever the internal arrangement was, the growths were excellent sound conductors. Broadened noses with no indications of nostrils. When she tried to expand or compress her lungs, nothing happened. Lungs were out of the picture here. The shape remained humanoid if not human, thickened, coarsened, grotesque, but functional, at least temporarily, beneath more than a thousand feet of water. She felt strong and vigorous; the awkward-looking body had responded to her purpose with agile ease. It was better, miraculously so, than they could have had any reason to expect!
She drifted closer to Parrol, touched his shoulder with her hand. His face split in a rather grisly grin; then he turned, momentarily scattering the feeders, and crouched beside a creamy luminous globe protruding from the ooze a few feet away. Nile floated down to see what he was doing.
Parrol laid a fingertip on the plant-animal’s surface. The luminant shuddered. A dark spot appeared where the finger touched it. The finger moved slowly up along the glowing surface, curved down again. A line of darkness followed it as the creature’s surface cells reacted to the touch. Parrol was, Nile realized suddenly, writing on his living parchment. After a few seconds she read:
RATIONAL NOW?
She moved her head irritably up and down, telling herself it wasn’t an entirely unreasonable question. The transformed Parrol produced his unpleasantly transformed grin again, detached something from his belt, held it up to her. With a shock of pleasure Nile recognized her gun. She clipped the sheathed UW to her belt while he resumed writing, then shifted to where she could read over his shoulder.
The two words of the question had almost faded out. New words appeared gradually:
OUR FRIENDS ARE HERE.
Nile gave him a startled glance. He nodded, motioned her to follow, turned and swam toward the thicket of brilliant-blue luminants for which she had headed when she broke away from him. Half crawling, half swimming, he moved into the thicket, Nile close behind. After some fifty feet they came into a less dense but much taller stand of a darkly red growth; here Parrol moved more cautiously. Presently he stopped, beckoned Nile up to him, pushed a few soggy armfuls of the red fronds apart.
Nile found herself looking down a sharply slanted rock slope at another section of the Rift floor a hundred yards below. The fire forest began again at the foot of the shelf, stretched away, clearly detailed nearby but blurring quickly as distance increased into a many-colored glow. Following Parrol’s pointing finger, she could barely make out the long dark hull of a submarine harvester grounded along the towering wall of the side of the Rift on the right. Two other harvesters lay farther out among the luminants. Together the ships formed a rough triangle, within which Nile now began to detect the moving figures of men, bulky in deep-water armor.
There was no mistaking the nature of their activity. The nidith was pale blue, a slender two-foot structure, individually unobtrusive among the greater luminants. But from the top of the shelf it was apparent that there must be millions of them in the bed which stretched away up the floor of the Rift, forming an unbroken carpet of undergrowth among the thickets and groves of the fire forest.
Parrol pointed to the right. About halfway between their position and the harvesters, a single armored figure sat astride a beam-gun floating just off the bottom, its short snout pointed upwards.
Nile nodded comprehendingly. Of the myriads of creatures that crawled, walked and swam among the fire forest’s branches and over the ooze, almost all were completely harmless from the viewpoint of a man in underwater armor. But a few species were far from harmless. As she looked, the beam-gun made an abrupt half-turn, following something which slithered rapidly through the fringes of darkness overhead, vanished upward into the gloom again without attempting to descend.
She felt a brief inward shudder. One glimpse of that flattened, rubbery twenty-foot disk had been enough to identify it—a cloakfish, a rather small one but quite large enough to be an immediate menace to any member of the nidith harvesting gang outside of the ships. The cloakfish ordinarily were found clinging to the walls of the ocean rifts they inhabited, grinding into the rock with the multiple sets of jaws lining their undersides to get at a variety of burrowing wormlike creatures within. But they put no strict limitation on their diet, frequently attacked divers on sight, and had been known to saw open a deep-water suit in less than a minute.
Parrol turned away, motioned with his head. She wasn’t sure what he intended but guessed he wanted to follow the edge of the shelf to a point on the right where a cluster of luminants rose high enough to let them drop into the lower section of the Rift without being detected by the guard riding the beam-gun. She nodded agreement, followed as Parrol wound his way through the thicket, moving parallel to the open slope.
As they approached the stand of tall growth, a curious thudding sensation reached Nile through the water, followed within seconds by another. She puzzled over that a moment, decided that beam-guns stationed on the far side of the harvesters had opened fire on some assailant. The gang probably had been at work here for a week or two; by now the area would be swarming both with cloakfish and with other predators gathered to feed on cloaks the guns had crippled or killed.
Predators such as that twenty-foot snake shape which came eeling up over the edge of the shelf a few yards away! It might have picked up their scent in the water, for it darted at her instantly, jaws yawning wide.
Nile wasn’t quite sure how it happened. She had pulled back slightly as the head struck past. Immediately afterwards, her legs were clamped about the slick, sinuous body, her arms locking her against it—
And her teeth were sunk into the thing! Not simply biting, but digging, slashing, cutting deeper through slimy hide that should have turned a knife, tearing the hide away and returning instantly to slice at unprotected flesh. The thicket of red luminants whirled about her, then open water; the section of snake body she gripped was knotting and twisting with monstrous strength. Bottom silt exploded in a dense cloud as they struck into it. For a moment, lifted high above her, she saw the thing’s head, great jaws snapping wildly, Parrol leeched to its neck.
Those were blurred, remote impressions. The only clear impressions were the savage hunger that blazed up in her as the creature drove at them and the horrified delight with which she was satisfying it in quickly gulped bites of salty flesh until—almost as suddenly as it had awakened—the hunger feeling was gone. It was like a fog clearing from her mind.
She pushed away from the snakelike thing. It was still writhing, but for all practical purposes it was dead. The big head flopped loosely, seemed half torn from the body. They appeared to have rolled into the tall stand of luminants in the lower section of the Rift for which she had thought Parrol was heading when the creature attacked. Parrol floated a few yards away, looking at her. Nile glanced up the length of the sea thing again and saw that he had been feeding, too. His response must have been as immediate and violent as hers—they’d had their guns within reach and made no attempt to use them!
She looked at the mangled beast and tried to feel disgust for what had happened. But there was no disgust. Her changed body had demanded nourishment, and meeting the demand had been a wholly agreeable experience. When the hunger surge rose again, she would feed it again.
Three or four generations of children in the shallows settlements, Parrol thought, must have had stories of Nandy-Cline’s sea hags recounted to them by their elders. In the version he had heard when very young, the sea hags were anthropomorphic ogres who lived in the depths of the ocean but came to the surface for the specific purpose of eating small boys who swam out farther than grownups thought they should go. The legend was supposed to have been created by the sledmen who had settled to live on the ocean world fifty or sixty years before the first Hub colonists arrived.