The skelt fighters continued their duels, but something had gone from the performances. There was an increasingly weary quality to the ritual, an almost palpable reluctance visible in the body language of the fighters.
I had the impression that they might soon stop, and turn to other matters.
I occupied myself by watching the final days of the colony, as the ship decoded the last of the damaged data stack. There were many more burials recorded by the colony's historian, though his camera work grew ever more unsteady and perfunctory. I didn't see Suhaili the Pipemaker again; perhaps she had already died in the violence that was decimating the colony.
I caught only glimpses of the creatures who were destroying the colony– they seemed like the nightmares of an alien culture, which I suppose they were.
Many colonists died at the hands of creatures who looked like week-old corpses dug from moist graves, bloated faces shining with patches of blue-white decay. One entire family was torn to pieces by a pack of three-legged dwarves with feathered skins and cruel talons, while the camera watched, shaking so much that it was hard to see what was happening. There were beautiful succubi with long teeth, stony giants with white eyes, and a surprising variety of other monstrosities, all of which I took to be creatures from Jaworld's rich mythic tradition. I recognized some from my travels there-duppies, zombies, chickcharneys. It was hard to watch, even the quick glimpses of killing captured before the videographer fled, and sometimes I had to turn from the holotank. The colonists had wandered so far from Jaworld, and even separated by centuries from that home, they were still vulnerable to the horrors that flowered there. They apparently had few guns with which to defend themselves; most were armed only with agricultural implements like axes and mattocks and cane knives. It was slaughter.
In the evening after I left the ship, I would lie in my bed and wonder how long it took for a people to find new fears on new worlds.
When Hu Moon finally emerged from her quarters, she discovered that Jang, in accordance with his instructions from the insurer, had temporarily disabled the ship's main engines. We no longer had the option of leaving immediately.
She called a meeting that evening to explain. «It's a quarantine lockout,» she said, pacing back and forth in the ship's lounge. «The idea, I suppose, is that in four standard months either we'll have resolved the situation or we'll all be dead and won't be able to lift the ship.» She snorted. «Good from the liability viewpoint, but inconvenient. I'd leave tonight if I could. We've established every important detail regarding the colony's failure, we have an acceptable variety of artifacts, and the colony's datastack. No one would criticize us for quitting.»
Dueine raised a tentative hand. «But, Moon, I still don't really understand what killed the colonists. Or what killed Irvane and Jang.»
Hu Moon sighed and rolled her eyes, and Dueine noticed. Dull hurt clouded her usually clear young eyes. I spoke up. «I'm sure we don't know everything about the killers. But it seems we've attracted the attention of an imitative, predatory life-form.» Hu Moon nodded at me, so I continued. «Apparently these creatures self-assemble out of small components, and they take on the shape of our dreams or maybe our fears. The colonists smoked a lot of cannabis, which probably made it worse, probably made their monsters even more vivid.»
«Will we die?» Dueine asked. «I don't want to.»
«No no,» I said quickly. «I'm sure we'll be safe inside the perimeter. They know about the stutterguns.» Besides, I thought, what could such a young and unformed person have to fear?
Hu Moon listened to this exchange with obvious impatience. «There's nothing so strange about this. There are many other chameleon species on the pangalac worlds,' she said.
«True,» I said. «But I seem to remember that most of them are limited to imitating actual physical objects.»
Hu Moon made a dismissing gesture. «Doesn't matter. All we have to do is sit tight until Jang's engine lockout expires, and then we'll go. It'll give Dueine and me an opportunity to organize the logs and write the reports. It's not going to be so easy to make this look like a success.»
She hurried out, with Dueine trailing miserably behind. I felt sorry for the young woman, who had obviously begun to serve as a focus for Hu Moon's irritation with the state of affairs.
Hu Moon and Dueine moved back into the ship, evidently believing that the ship was safer. I soon followed them; the solidity of the ship and its internal security systems were somehow comforting. I kept to my cabin during the day, listening to my small collection of music. Increasingly my thoughts turned to Suhaili the Pipemaker.
At night I tried to do Jang's job, since Hu Moon was simply hiding and hoping for the best. Days passed that I didn't see her or Dueine at all. Then we'd meet in a corridor or I'd see her in the lounge, picking up a bottle. She grew haggard, and lost some of her beauty.
I found a spare suit of servo armor, and began wearing it at night. It was awkward, but I felt a little safer as I walked the perimeter. I checked the guns and sensors every night, and I tried to think of ways to make the perimeter more secure. I considered asking Hu Moon to thaw out some icicle labor and have them stand sentry duty. A moment's thought convinced me that was a bad idea. The icicles weren't smart enough to be effective. More to the point, we really didn't need to find out what demons had driven them to their crimes.
Almost two weeks after Jang's death the dead scholars appeared. I hadn't seen Hu Moon more than a handful of times in those weeks. There were no more evening social occasions.
The monsters kept their distance but I found them oddly fascinating. Watching them at their inexplicable pursuits provided the only amusement available to me. I was lonely, and I finally understood how much Jang's distant friendship had meant to me.
At night there was always something going on in the ruins. Irvane's terrible goblins had returned to the site, and every evening they fought, battling each other with fists and teeth, with crude clubs, with swords fashioned of jagged stone chips embedded in limber sticks. These combats were mostly brief skirmishes. I had the feeling they were testing each other. But once two of them fought to the death, and the loser dissolved into the soil in a mass of wriggling stone worms
The first scholar appeared to be a somewhat frail elderly human, wearing a tweedy suit, in a fashion not seen in Dilvermoon for centuries. It tottered through the moonlit ruins in an unsteady path, leaning on a cane, with a look of almost convincing terror on its kindly face.
It approached me where I sat beside the perimeter.
«Young man,» it quavered. «I seem to have gotten myself lost.»
In other circumstances I might have been amused by this archaic mode of speech. «Young man»? I shifted my smart gun so it pointed at the creature.
It blinked large watery eyes. «Son? Is that a weapon you're aiming at me?»
«Yes,» I answered. «It is.»
It laughed timidly. «You won't need that. I'm harmless. But I don't know where I am.»
«You're on Graylin IV,» I said. «How is it you don't know that?»
A passing twitch of some alien emotion crossed its face, so quickly I couldn't interpret it. «Are you in charge here, son?»
«No.»
An unpleasant sharpness edged its voice. «Then I suggest you find your superior. Immediately.»
I nodded. Even if I couldn't imagine a reason why a human should suddenly appear on this empty world, that didn't mean such a thing was impossible. My imagination, after all, was no longer good for much of anything.
«I'll fetch her,» I said. In a moment of thoughtlessness, I attempted a courtesy. «Would you like to rest here?»