Tonight the ship's computer had chosen to show us scenes from a possibly religious ceremony, one which took place every day at sunset. Anyway, this was Hu Moon's interpretation. I thought it possible that the leaders of the colony had read the same book on expedition socialization as Hu Moon, but I kept this speculation to myself.
The babies were put into their cribs and the adults drifted into a small plaza at the center of the settlement, faces washed and hair combed, wearing looks of mild expectation.
The computer edited out much of the footage, since there's little excitement to be found in a large quiet group of people watching the sun go down. Occasionally the holocamera would move in close, to fill our tank with a single face.
Here was a middle-aged man with thin sharp features, puffing on a hand-rolled cigarette, slanted eyes half-closed. He still wore his hair in the matted ropes that had at times been fashionable on Jaworld, but I noticed that many of the younger colonists had abandoned the style. Once I'd wondered aloud why they hadn't just gone back to Jaworld, when Bonton became too dangerous. Irvane had instructed me in Jaworld history, telling me that the Jaworlders had come to value the depopulation resulting from the notorious Ganja Wars, when so many had died or emigrated from their beautiful world, including the ancestors of the dead colonists. The Jaworlders had instituted strict controls on reproduction and ended immigration. The only visitors they welcomed were tourists, who came, spent their money, and left. They made no exceptions for expatriate groups.
The camera moved to an old woman with bloodshot eyes and a cloud of frizzy white hair, who held a chillum expertly between her big-knuckled fingers, and who released clouds of white smoke into the waning light, laughing silently.
Many of the smokers sat by themselves, but here and there small groups passed fat spliffs from hand to hand. No one spoke.
The camera lingered especially long on a beautiful young woman, with skin as black and polished as the shells she wore in her long, softly waved hair. I supposed that the camera operator had, or hoped for, an intimate connection with her, so lovingly was she framed. The ruddy light of sunset haloed her. She sat apart from the others, smoking from a simple bamboo-stemmed brass pipe, her expression inward and unreadable, even when the camera zoomed in so that her heavy-lidded eyes filled the screen.
«One of the community's pipemakers, Suhaili,» said our computer in its soft artificial voice. «A person of high status, a status derived from her important calling and from substantial personal charisma.»
I could understand that. Across the centuries, she seemed as real to me as any of my companions, and more interesting. Strange to think how long she'd been dead, strange to think that some of the bone chips Irvane had sifted from the site might have belonged to that elegant creature.
I found this a sad thought, too. I had no more urge to socialize, so I left the ship, returned to my own shelter module and tried to sleep.
THE PERIMETER ALARM shrieked, waking me an hour after midnight. I rolled from my cot, groggy and confused, but I remembered to grab the weapon I'd been issued, a short-barreled smartgun that wouldn't fire while pointed at any of the expedition's members, the ship, or at any critical life-support systems. It was the perfect weapon for an untrained person. I hoped the others were similarly armed.
I ran outside. A naked dead woman four meters tall was staggering along the perimeter, screaming in brassy harmony with the alarm. I say she was a dead woman because her enormous belly was ripped open from breastbone to pubis, though nothing but blood had spilled from the wound. In fact, it seemed to me that there was nothing but emptiness inside the woman, and I wondered where she found breath to make those terrible sounds.
Her skin was that horrid blue-gray color that invades corpses, her eyes seemed to look in different directions, her arms hung stiffly at her sides. Her great size somehow emphasized the impossible horror of her existence.
I thought I was hallucinating until the stuttergun atop the security module fired a long burst and cut her into tumbling fragments.
Jang stood beside the module, wearing black monomol armor and equipped with a shoulder-mounted weapon almost as powerful as the stuttergun. He tapped at a wrist-mounted dataslate; evidently he had ordered the stuttergun to fire.
«What...?» I asked.
«No idea,» he said in his soft monotone. I couldn't see his expression behind the mirror visor of his helmet, but I doubted his face would show any of the confusion I felt.
Irvane arrived, clad in a fashionably mauve version of Jang's armor, waving a gun even bigger than Jang's. He resembled a dangerous grape. «What was it?» he asked in a voice full of disbelief and fear; evidently he had seen the thing from his shelter.
Dueine appeared in her doorway, dressed charmingly in a pair of bunny-rabbit bedroom slippers and nothing else, eyes rolling, face white. She seemed to be on the verge of violent nausea, throat working, hands clasped between her pretty breasts. I averted my eyes politely, until Hu Moon shouted for her and she stumbled back into their shelter.
«Get me a sample, Leeson,» Jang said, offering me a specimen case. «If you would be so kind.»
I took the case, though my first impulse was to hand it back. «Sample of what?»
«Its flesh... or whatever it was made out of,» Jang said looking over my shoulder. «Better hurry.»
I twitched around and saw that the chunks of shattered monster were apparently melting into the ground. A disturbing crawling motion accompanied this disappearance. I wasn't enthusiastic, but of course I was the most expendable member of the expedition, except for the icicles. So when Jang briefly switched off the perimeter sensors and waved me across the line, I went... more or less willingly.
I trotted out toward the monster's remaining bits. At closer range, these seemed to be devolving into a myriad of tiny white wormlike forms, which then disappeared writhing into the ground. I knelt beside the largest remaining piece of monster flesh, and activated the case, which snapped shut on the stuff, along with a bit of lichen and soil.
I shook it; it rattled like a stone.
Hu Moon came forth as I returned from the perimeter with my sample. She was somewhat rumpled and smelled of sex. Her manner conveyed suspicious annoyance, as though she blamed us for the event that had disturbed her evening.
«So, what was it?» she asked in a brittle voice. «Jang, this is your area of expertise. What do you know?»
«Almost nothing,» Jang said politely. He took the sample case from me. «Did you get anything?» he asked me.
«I think so,» I said. «You won't believe it, but the stuff, the stuff that wiggled away... it looked like white stone. Wiggly stone.»
«'Wiggly stone'? What next?» Hu Moon was clearly exasperated. «You're not supposed to have any imagination.»
«So I'm told,» I said, looking at my feet.
Jang shook the sample case and it still rattled. I looked up to see him smiling at me with what seemed genuine sympathy. «Sounds like stone, doesn't it?» he said to Hu Moon.
She shook her head. «Tell me what's really going on. First thing in the morning.» She went back to bed and I wondered how she could be so incurious about an event that appeared, to me at least, to defy rationality. If a giant dead woman had indeed marched wailing around our camp, then the universe had gone crazy and nothing could be relied on. I shuddered. How could there be a reassuring explanation for such a thing? Perhaps I felt this way because of my crippled mind, my burned-away imagination, but of course there's no way to know.