"You idiots," she said, "think the sight of a woman without clothes is an automatic invitation to a free fuck. I've told you what's what, and if you're too dumb to get the message ..." She fumbled in her bundle and brought out a huge knife with a thirty-centimeter blade of the sort once popularized by the adventurer and slave smuggler Colonel James Bowie. "One step towards me ..."
"Honorable sir!" said Choku's voice in Sungao. "Wherefore did you go off without me?" The knife disappeared as the Kook came forward. "Pardon me, Madam Supreme Choraga! I promised to help and protect Mr. Salazar, as by carrying the pack he bears."
Without sign of embarrassment, Alexis donned her shirt and pants and belted on the sheath knife. She said to Choku: "I was merely changing from my sacred garment."
"I understand, madam."
Salazar, waiting for Alexis to finish her preparations, caught a flash of brown in the nanshins, which whisked out of sight. My first stump-tailed kusi! he thought. Alexis's body vanished from his mind. Examining the contents of his pack, he suddenly cursed his own stupidity, saying: "Choku, I seem to have forgotten a camera. Will you please run back to our tent and get me one? The smaller Hayashi will do, with extra film." Serves you right, he added to himself, for letting this hypocritical floozy come between you and your scientific task.
"As you say, honorable boss." Choku trotted back down the trail.
She was on her feet with her bundle slung over her shoulder. "Come along! We can't spend the morning fooling around or we'll never get to the crater for lunch."
She set off with a resolute stride, as if daring Salazar to follow. He felt a twinge of resentment at having his abortive suggestion of lovemaking scorned as "fooling around," but that was Alexis. He deserved it, for he was like a moth circling too close to a flame.
They hiked between somber, looming groves of nanshin trees to the right and left, interspersed with thickets of jade-green, canelike plants reminding Salazar of the smaller kinds of Terran bamboos. Now and then he saw kusis, but they scampered away with piercing whistles before he had more than a glimpse. Occasional zutas flitted on rainbow wings, like bizarre combinations of butterfly, lizard, and bat.
Larger beasts were few compared to the fauna below the nanshin belt. Once they met a wild kudzai, an old tusker somewhat like a reptilian wild boar. While Salazar unslung his pack and got out his smaller gun, a pistol with a detachable stock, kudzai and Terrans eyed one another. Before Salazar got his weapon assembled and aimed, the kudzai snorted, trotted back up the trail, and vanished into a gap among the nanshins.
When the trail was comparatively easy, Salazar asked: "Alexis, what's the attitude of the community toward the Adriana lumbering project? Really, it's the Reverend Dumfries's enterprise."
With audible irritation, she snapped, "We went all over that in Sungecho. We'll just take things as they come. If Shiiko takes a dim view of Adriana's plans, she'll take care of them, never fear!"
"How would a spirit do that? Haunt the lumber camp?"
She smiled grimly. "Shiiko lords it over storms, eruptions, lightning, and earthquakes."
"Would you pray to her for those things?"
"No; we merely call her attention to Adriana's intentions. The rest is up to her."
"Seems to me you take a pretty laissez-faire attitude towards an ecological disaster."
She halted and faced him with an expression that showed her hair-trigger temper unleashed. "Oh, shut up, Kirk! I've run Kashania well so far, and I won't let any skinny little rabbit-faced priss dictate to me!"
"I merely pointed out—"
"Shut up!" she screamed. Then in a normal tone: "Come on! If we're to make the crater, we've got to move."
For an hour they tramped in silence. The footpath carried them up the slope to the upper edge of the nanshin belt. Above that zone, the air was cooler and the plant life sparser: stunted shrubs, discouraged-looking patches of gray-green grassoid, and the corpse of an occasional young nanshin that had given up the attempt to sprout and grow above the climatic zone to which evolution had adapted it. Ahead rose the final cone of Sungara's summit with its plume of vapor.
As they climbed, Salazar noted increasing signs of former lava flows. They clambered over ridges of glassy black lava rock, snaking down the mountainside like the roots of a giant tree. When they reached the final slope, the vegetation almost ceased, and they walked on the tormented surface of solidified lava.
Salazar was glad of his heavy, thick-soled boots; the lava's glassy fractures, where its millions of gas bubbles intersected its surface, would soon cut common shoes to pieces. They scrambled over irregularities. Alexis bounded ahead, leaping pits and trenches with a recklessness that frightened Salazar. If she fell and injured herself, he wondered how he could get her back to the community. He was no weakling; but she was a big girl, probably weighing more than he.
The terrain leveled off as they neared the crater. To right and left, little plumes of vapor rose from holes and chinks in the rock, merging into an all-pervading, heaven-veiling mist. A breeze whistled about the hikers' heads.
Alexis said: "Here we are!"
At the rim of the crater, Salazar moved cautiously forward, testing every step. The level surface of the summit fell away abruptly into a circular pit almost a kilometer across, with vertical walls descending over fifty meters to the lake of lava. On most of the lake, the lava had cooled to a scum of silver-gray rock traversed by zigzag fissures. Through these cracks, the liquid lava below the surface shone red even in the misty sunlight. Here and there across the surface rose fountains of bright red liquid lava, rising and falling in short, thick columns. From the crater came a continuous swish-swish, swish-swish like the sound of a surf.
As Salazar watched, some fountains died down while others broke through the crust and spouted in their turn, throwing up dark fragments of scum with the molten lava. Alexis said:
"There's your crater, Kirk. The Kooks call it 'Shikawa,' from the volcano spirit Shiiko. Let's walk along the rim." She started off to their left.
Salazar followed cautiously over the twisted surface. Presently they reached a place where the rim bent sharply to the left and back again, forming an embayment enclosed by a nearly circular wall about four meters across, with a point on either side. She said:
"You get a fine view out there on the point, if you're not afraid."
"Me, afraid?" With a snort, he stepped out on the tapering point, saying: "Looks like the old Christian picture of hell, doesn't it? Those fountains could be sinners tossing their arms in the flames."
He moved still further out on the point. He suffered a mild acrophobia, so that looking down almost vertically into the lava made his testicles crawl. You damned fool, he berated himself, letting this masterful bitch taunt you into risking your life to show you're not afraid!
A shout in Sungao made him start. Choku called: "Mr. Sarasara! Honorable boss, I have your camera."
Salazar stepped abruptly back to the base of the point, colliding with Alexis close behind him. With a yelp of dismay, she fell back and ended sitting on a bulbous mass of lava rock, crying:
"Ouch! That hurt, you clumsy bastard!"
"I—I'm sorry!" said a flustered Salazar. "I didn't know you were so close."
"Oh, shut up! I'll have a sore rump for a week, with a bruise the size of a saucer. Now where in hell's lunch?"
She rummaged in her bag while Salazar did the same in his. Choku asked:
"Is all well with you, sir?"
"All is well. And with you likewise?"
"Likewise. I had a certain worry about you, but I see that I arrived in time."
"Good of you," grunted Salazar, munching a sandwich. He pulled out a bottle of bumbleberry, filled a paper cup, and handed it to Alexis, who muttered an ungracious thanks. He poured his own in silence. He sneezed; he had worked up a sweat during the climb, and now the cool wind made him shiver.