“But Krinpit do not eat human beings,” objected Colonel Tree, and Sweggert chimed in: “There’s nobody down there. Nobody’s gone through the perimeter all day.”
Dalehouse repeated his question into the radio and shrugged. “That’s what he says. He could be wrong about the eating part, I guess — he doesn’t have a very clear concept of killing, except to eat.”
Sweggert put down the strobe. “We better tell the colonel,” he said.
Colonel Tree said, “That’s correct. You do so, Dalehouse. Sergeant, form your squad on the beach in thirty seconds, full combat gear. We’re going to see what’s happening.”
Half an hour later Marge Menninger herself, with thirty armed grunts behind her, met the first party coming back along the beach. There were no casualties, or at least none from the Food Bloc, but they were carrying two people. One was in a sort of sling made from two jackets knotted together, the other on Sergeant Sweggert’s shoulder, fireman-carry. They were both dead. When Sweggert put his burden down it was obvious why he had been easy to carry. Both legs were missing, and so was part of his head.
The other body was less mutilated, so that Marge Menninger recognized her at once.
It was Tinka.
Marge stood numbly while Sweggert made his report. No Krinpit in sight; they had got away, so far that they couldn’t even be heard. Both people were dead when they got there, but recently; the bodies were still warm. For that matter, they were still warm now. And the man had had a packet in a waterproof wrapping inside his shirt. Margie accepted it and tore it open. Microfiches — scores of them. The man’s ID card, which showed that he was the Indonesian Tinka had gone to contact. A pair of child-sized spectacles — flat glass, not optically ground. Why glasses? For that matter, how had the two got here? Had they been caught as spies and then somehow escaped? And how had they come the long distance from the Greasy camp to the beach where they died?
By the time they got back to the base, she had an answer to at least part of the question, because Dalehouse reported that the balloonists had spotted something farther down the beach that looked like the remains of a deflated rubber boat. She swung the tiny glasses from their elastic band as she listened, nodding, taking in all of it as information to process, not quite ready to take in the information of Tinka’s death as a pain to feel.
She looked down at the glasses. They were now almost opaque.
“That’s interesting,” she said in a voice that was very nearly normal. “They must be photosensitive glass. Like indoor-outdoor sunglasses.” She glanced up at the sullen red coal of Kung overhead. “Only what in the world would anybody want with them on Jem?”
SEVENTEEN
Six KILOMETERS down the shoreline from where he had slain the Poison Ghosts, Sharn-igon paused in his flight to scratch out a shallow pit under a bluff. He needed to hide because he needed to rest.
Digging was always dangerous for a Krinpit because of the Ghosts Below. But here it was unlikely they would be near — too close to the water. They did not like to risk their tunnels flooding. And the many-tree on the bluff above him was a good sign. The roots of the many-tree were distasteful to them.
As he settled himself in, Sharn-igon wondered briefly what had become of his cobelligerent, the Poison Ghost Dulla. He did not feel concern, as one might for a fellow being. He did not think of Dulla in that way. Dulla was a weapon, a tool, without “being-ness.” After they had slain the Poison Ghosts Dulla called “Greasies,” they had both fled, and of course Dulla had fled faster and farther. Sharn-igon did not think of that as a betrayal. If he had been the nimble one and Dulla the slow-moving, he would certainly have done the same. Dulla’s utility as a tool lay in his speed and in the way he was able to speak words to other Poison Ghosts that caused them to hesitate, to be uncertain, while Sharn-igon had time to come in upon them and kill. It was so very easy to kill Poison Ghosts! A few slashes, a blow with the club-claw — it took no more than that. Sometimes they had weapons, and Sharn-igon had learned to respect some of those weapons. But the two on the beach had had so little — a bright-sounding popgun whose tiny bullets bounced off his shell, a thing that squirted some sort of foul, stinging smell that made him feel queer and unpleasant for a moment but did not slow him in the kill. Such as they he could kill with or without his tool, the Poison Ghost Dulla.
He switched his carapace back and forth to wedge himself deeper in his pit and rested, his hearing receptors watchful toward the water, his feelers drilled deep into the soil to listen for vibrations from any approaching Ghosts Below. It was the burrowers he feared, more than any danger from the water or the beach.
Of course, in normal circumstances an adult Krinpit in shell was a match for a dozen of the Ghosts Below — as long as he could stay on the surface, or at least in sound of it. In the open, Ghosts Below seemed deaf, running almost at random. But these were not normal circumstances. Sharn-igon was not only weary; he felt sick. He felt irritable, tense, bloated — ready, he would have said to his he-wife (but Cheee-pruitt was months dead, his carapace dry), to stridulate and jump out of his shell. But it was not the right time for that. He was not due for many months yet, so it couldn’t be normal pre-molt tension.
Abruptly his sphincter loosened. He regurgitated everything he had eaten in a great flood — meat of deafworm, scraps of chitin of crabrat, half-digested fruits and fungi and leaves.
Vomiting left him weak but calm. After resting for a moment, he covered the mess over and then methodically began to clean his shell. No doubt the Poison Ghosts were taking revenge for being killed on the beach. It had to be their scraps of flesh still caught in Sharn-igon’s chelae that were making him ill. That — and the inner sickness that had claimed him when the Poison Ghosts first came to his city and began the remorseless chain of circumstance that had taken all joy from his life.
Krinpit did not cry. They had no tear ducts; they had no eyes to have tear ducts in. They did have the emotion of sorrow, and no culture-driven taboos against expressing it in their own way. That way was stillness. A quiet Krinpit — or as close to quiet as a Krinpit could get — was a weeping Krinpit.
For most of an hour, once he had polished the last dried particle of alien blood off his tympanum, Sharn-igon was nearly soundless: a rasp of claw against carapace, an occasional respiring moan, little else.
Unbidden, sounds of happier times echoed in his mind. He heard Cheee-pruitt again, and the little female — what was her name? — whom they had impregnated and who bore their young. She had been a dulcet creature. She had had almost a personality of her own, along with the bittersweet appeal of any mated female, her young growing and eating inside her until too much was destroyed and she died, and the brood polished her carapace clean and emerged to the loud, exciting world of their wife-father’s back.
But everything was changed now.
It was all the fault of the Poison Ghosts! Ever since the first of them had arrived and Cheee-pruitt — dear, lost Cheee-pruitt — had had the unwisdom to try to eat it, Sharn-igon’s world had fallen apart. Not just Cheee-pruitt, all of it. The Krinpit he had mobilized against the Poison Ghosts Dulla called Greasies had been punished severely. His own village-mates had been attacked from the air in reprisal, and so many of them were dead. And how many had he succeeded in killing in return? A few. Hardly any. The two on the beach, the handful that he and Dulla had surprised at the outpost — not enough! And all of Dulla’s plans had come to little: the Krinpit village nearest to the Fats had wavered and wobbled, promised to join in an attack and withdrawn the promise; and meanwhile all he and Dulla could do was skulk around like crabrats, looking for strays to attack and finding none. Until the two came out of their sinking vessel -