I nodded. «You're the bosslady,» I said.
She looked at me sharply, but said no more.
THREE OF THE CREATURES returned to the perimeter that night, and I watched from the ship as Hu Moon went out to meet them. She stayed with them until dawn, all of them talking animatedly. All of them full of large gestures, wide smiles beaming at each other, very collegial, as though they were meeting over coffee and pastry in the senior teacher's lounge. But beyond them, in the ruins, two skelt fighters moved through a stately ritual, and I occasionally glimpsed one of Irvane's frightening children, slipping quickly through the broken stones.
Hu Moon removed her helmet and set her gun aside early in the evening, though she kept to her side of the security line.
She returned to the ship as the dim brown light began to paint the ruins. I went down to meet her.
«They could have killed you easily,» I said as she walked slowly into the lower egress bay.
Her eyes were dreamy, her face a little flushed, as though with a pleasant excitement. She stripped off her armor and hung it in a security locker, without looking at me. When it became obvious that she had nothing to say, I went back to my quarters, there to doze through the day.
Every night additional dead scholars showed up, until there were more than twenty creatures attending Hu Moon. They resembled men and women of past eras, dressed in garments that had been out of style for centuries in the pangalac urban worlds. They stood around in knots, talking to each other. The largest clump always formed across the perimeter from Hu Moon, who spoke with as much animation as any of the others. If they'd had glasses to hold, and plastic plates with toothpick food, the gathering might have been mistaken for a faculty cocktail party.
Maybe not. Watching, I thought I detected a kind of hungry watchfulness among the dead scholars who were not at that moment speaking to Hu Moon, as if their conversations were nothing more than window-dressing. I have no imagination, as I've mentioned so many times, at such tedious length. So perhaps this perception was accurate.
The scholars drifted away as the dawn approached, and I could see Hu Moon making gestures of entreaty as the last of them left. When she came in, she was exhausted but feverishly happy; she spoke to me as little as possible, but she was polite. She continued to shake her head at my concerns.
«Don't care, Leeson.» She smiled. «They may be monsters. People certainly called them monsters. People were jealous. Brilliant people get that a lot.»
«But,» I said. «If they're not real, then they're just you. You're just talking to yourself.»
«Then I'm better company than I ever knew,» she said, and would hear no more.
After a few days, Hu Moon moved Dueine out of the quarters they'd shared since the expedition's beginning, and into my cabin. Hu Moon reassigned me to Jang's small utilitarian cabin. I wasn't unhappy with this move, because now I had immediate access to Jang's video surveillance of the site, using a holobank that took up one entire wall of the sleeping cubicle. I could watch the creatures in the ruins without risk.
This rapidly lost its appeal. The brutality of the life there grew much worse at close range. I began to see the goblins kill the dead scholars, a particularly ugly sight, since the scholars could put up no effective resistance. Worse yet, the goblins took their time disassembling their victims. The scholars screamed in an entirely human manner and looked like human beings inside; I saw blood and entrails and bone. The illusion was maintained until the creature died, at which point the body parts melted into a homogenous mass of white stone that frothed away into the ground.
I helped Dueine carry her few things to her new home. Tears spilled silently down her cheeks as we moved through the ship's corridors, but I could think of no comforting words.
After we'd put her things down on the bed, Dueine turned to me, still sniffling. «I don't understand what's going on with Moon. How can she be so... involved... with those creatures? Why doesn't she see what they are?»
I shook my head and edged toward the door. «People see what they want to see, sometimes,» I said.
Dueine sobbed. «I never thought she'd do such a thing,» she said, waving her hands, a gesture that seemed to take in both her tear-stained face and the little cabin.
«People are unpredictable,» I muttered as I left.
«Not you,» Dueine said, somewhat unkindly. I guess I knew what she meant, but I think she was wrong.
When one night, Hu Moon did not put on her armor, and left her gun in the ship, I suspected her death was near. But the creatures did not seize her immediately, as I had assumed they would. Maybe they were more intelligent than I'd thought. If they'd crossed the perimeter boundary to take her, the guns might have destroyed at least a few of them. In any case, they continued to meet her at the perimeter, and she continued to be entranced by them, for the next three nights.
On that night, when she went out, Dueine followed her. I watched the young woman go with no particular sense of foreboding. Still, Dueine was not wearing armor, and I had undertaken to fulfill as best I could Jang's security obligations. So I put on my own shell, took my smartgun and went after her.
I was too late to do anything useful. As I came from the ship, I could see the two women in their silvery shipsuits, silhouetted against the dark mass of the crowd. They appeared to be arguing vehemently. There was much arm-waving and foot-stamping. I quickened my pace, but it happened before I could reach them.
Just as I approached the perimeter Hu Moon stepped across the line, throwing her arms around two of the creatures, as if in joyful greeting. They urged her away from the line, while other scholars closed ranks tightly around her. A murmur of conversation rose higher and now it sounded like the buzzing of insects. My view was obscured, but evidently Hu Moon sensed some wrongness and began to struggle. Perhaps she felt stone under her arms rather than aging human flesh. I saw her try to push the creatures away, to no effect at all.
Dueine very foolishly ran after her. I shouted, «No!» but she didn't listen.
The goblins burst from the ground like reanimated corpses in some old horror drama. They seized Dueine by the arms and legs and hair, and she had hardly time to scream once before they pulled her into pieces.
Shock slowed me, but I finally got the smartgun up and pulled the trigger. My first burst caught several of the ones who had killed her. As they shattered, they dropped the pieces of her body they clutched, but others took them up and darted away. In an instant, the ground was empty except for Dueine's torso, still pulsing blood, a shining black pool in the security lights. The smartgun was still bucking in my hands and I forced myself to release the trigger.
Hu Moon began to scream. I turned to see her, still surrounded by the crowd of dead scholars, struggling ineffectually with them. They'd taken her to a spot of soft soil, a filled-in test excavation. So many creatures clustered around her that I could see her only occasionally, but she seemed to be slowly sinking into the ground. I suddenly understood that the creatures were taking her down into the soil, fingers pulling back the dirt and working her down slowly into its grip. I wondered if other creatures were down in the soil, pulling at her flesh; her screams now had a terrible fearful edge. I tried to shoot but the smartgun was silent, evidently unwilling to fire in the direction of a living crew member.
Before I could decide if I were brave enough to leave the perimeter, Hu Moon's face slid beneath the soil and her screams stopped.
The creatures melted after her in tumbling haste and were gone before I could pull the trigger.
I stood guard over Dueine's meager remains until daybreak. As the surviving member of the original expedition, I now had direct access to the ship's information systems. I read Dueine's will. She had specified cremation, so without any formality, I put her body into the ship's mass converter.