“Nature’s, or Urthona’s, way of making sure the various species of plants survive the catastrophe,” Kickaha said.
But when the mutations of terrain stopped and the carcasses became too stinking to eat, they had to begin hunting. Though the humans could run and jump faster, once they learned the new method of locomotion, the animals were proportionately just as speedy. But Kickaha fashioned a new type of bola, two or three antelope skulls connected by a rawhide cord. He would whirl this around and around and then send it skimming along the ground to entangle the legs of the quarry. McKay and Anana made their own bolas, and all three were quite adept at casting them. They even caught some of the wild moosoids with these.
Those seeds that fell back on the splitoff put down roots, and new plants grew quickly. The grass and the soil around them became bleached as the nutritional elements were sucked up. The plantling would grow a set of legs and pull up the main root or break it off and move on to rich soil. The legs would fall off but a new set, longer and stronger, would grow. After three moves, the plants stayed rooted until they had attained their full growth. Their maturation period was exceedingly swift by Terrestrial standards.
Of course, many were eaten by the elephants, moosoids, and other animals which made plants their main diet. But enough survived to provide countless groves of ambulatory trees and bushes.
The three had their usual troubles with baboons, dogs, and the feline predators. Added to those was a huge bird they’d never seen before. Its wing-spread was fifty feet, though the body was comparatively small. Its head was scarlet; the eyes, cold yellow; the green beak, long, hooked, and sharp. The wings and body were bluish, and the short, thick heavily taloned legs were ochre. It swooped down from the sky just after dusk, struck, and carried its prey off. Since the gravity was comparatively weak here, it could lift a human into the air. Twice, one of them almost got Anana. Only by throwing herself on the ground when Kickaha had cried a warning had she escaped being borne away.
“I can’t figure out what it does when there is no satellite,” Kickaha said. “It could never lift a large body from the surface of the primary. So what does it live on between-times?”
“Maybe it just soars around, living off its fat, until the planet spits up another part of it,” Anana said.
They were silent for a while then, imagining these huge aerial creatures gliding through the air fifty miles up, half-asleep most of the time, waiting
for the mother planet to propel its meat on a Moon-sized dish up to it.
“Yes, but it has to land somewhere on the satellite to eat and to mate,” he said. “I wonder where?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I got an idea, but it’s so crazy I don’t want to talk about it yet. It came to me in a dream last night.”
Anana suddenly gripped his arm and pointed upward. He and McKay looked up. There, perhaps a half a mile above them, the palace was floating by.
They stood silently watching it until it had disappeared behind some high mountains.
Kickaha sighed and said, “I guess that when it’s on automatic it circles the satellite. Urthona must have set it to do that so that he could observe the moon. Damn! So near yet so far!”
The Lord must have gotten pleasure out of watching the shifts in the terrain and the adjustments of people and animals to it. But surely he hadn’t lived alone in it. What had he done for companionship and sex? Abducted women from time to time, used them, then abandoned them on the surface? Or kicked them out and watched them fall one hundred miles, perhaps accompanying them during the descent to see their horror, hear their screams?
It didn’t matter now. Urthona’s victims and Urthona were all dead now. What was important was how they were going to survive the rejoining of primary and secondary.
Anana said that her uncle had told her that about a month prior to this event, the satellite again mutated form. It changed from a globe to a rough