The Golem sail looped its neck round and down so its head came level with hers. ‘From its very limited duties here. It is a runcible AI, with the capacity for governing a high-tech, civilized planet, yet it here only possesses limited power to intercede in matters beyond the Line. That is something Polity citizens arriving here tend to forget.’
Erlin merely grunted, and continued chewing on her meat. She then turned her gaze inland to where the dingle was swamping the old volcanic outflow. The peartrunk trees there were lower than usual, their trunks standing like the open cageworks of mangroves. Further inland grew yanwoods, and scattered amid them were trees resembling pines. On the beach, which seemed comprised of obsidian fragments, a couple of small armadillo-like heirodonts were snuffling about. Erlin finally returned her attention to the whelks.
The hammer whelks had nearly reached their prey, and were now poised on the ledge below them. The attack was fast. All three whelks flicked upright, at the perimeter of the frog whelk cluster, everting their tubular suckers. Immediately the frog whelks exploded from the stone, each propelled high in the air by its single powerful foot and splashing into the sea all around. All but three of them. The hammer whelks flowed over their victims, extruded their bone-tipped hammer feet and began working on them like a team of blacksmiths. Scattering fragments of shell around like broken crockery, they soon exposed the meat they sought. But then one of the de-shelled frog whelks escaped, bouncing along the promontory, a glob of pink flesh shaped like an inverted carrot with two eye-stalks above and one cantilevered foot below. Puff launched and, with a couple of flaps, was soon directly above the fugitive. Noticing the sail, the denuded whelk tried to leap into the sea, but Puff snatched it in mid-air and quickly chomped it down. That was perhaps merciful, since it would never have survived without its shell, and its death would have been slower in the sea. Erlin returned her attention to the others. Two of the hammer whelks were now fighting over a single frog whelk, whilst the third hammer whelk dragged its own catch out of range. The two contestants tore their victim apart between them, then seemed content with their separate spoils.
‘It is all the time. Everywhere…’ said Zephyr, gazing with what Erlin thought was a peculiar intensity towards the whelks.
‘What is?’ she asked.
‘They are not alive,’ said Zephyr, turning to her.
‘Of course they are.’ Erlin shrugged. ‘Well in some cases not any more.’
‘Dead?’ Zephyr asked, something leaden and weird in his voice.
‘Well that’s the way it goes.’
‘Time we moved on,’ said Zephyr.
Erlin did not bother to argue. She stood and turned her back to Huff, who had been carrying her for some time now, but it was Zephyr who grabbed the handle protruding from the harness she wore and hauled her into the sky. Perhaps Huff had grown tired of her chattering. As she was carried back over the island, Erlin stared with fascination down into the caldera. This contained a steaming lake around which a herd of half-seen somethings were moving. Then, in the ocean extending beyond the other side of the island she saw huge floating plants much like water lilies. Large pale blue blossoms floated on the surface.
‘Look, flowers,’ said Erlin, continuing to munch on the steak she had retained. When she finally finished it, and licked her fingers clean, she saw that her digits had become much the same blue as the blossoms below, and acknowledged that maybe Zephyr was carrying her because he was the only one safe in doing so now.
‘Lilies,’ said Zephyr. ‘Of course.’
The giant whelk closely focused one of her dinner-plate eyes on the ceramo-carbide hook embedded in the tip of her tentacle. The thing had actually ripped through her flesh; nothing else had caused her such damage in a very long time. This only made her angrier, as certainly this hook, and its ten metres of line attached, had come from the ship above her. She had seen turbul being hauled up there and in all the excitement had tried grabbing one. Big mistake. She then recalled other injuries she had suffered: memories reawakened in the newly functioning lobes of her brain.
The brood comprising herself and her siblings had been large, but over the years had been whittled down. Initially, nearly all the other denizens of the ocean had presented a problem to them. Leeches, given the opportunity, would snatch plugs of flesh; prill often planed through to scythe off the occasional tentacle of the unwary. She herself had lost a tentacle that way, but soon regrew it. Turbul took half their number, avoiding only those whose shells had hardened sufficiently, like her own. Glister ambushes took her kin, but only when the parent went off to feed its gargantuan appetite. One once attacked her, too, but had been unable to dislodge her. Then, beginning their long migration into the depths, they began to mature and grow stronger. In time her own skin became too tough for leeches to penetrate, and her shell too hard for turbul to crack. Only larger prill and glisters managed to snatch away the odd tentacle, but that soon became a dangerous option for them, as even they eventually became prey for herself and her kin. But deeper down the brood soon learnt that there were other, larger predators.
A monstrous heirodont had assailed and crunched down many of them before the parent attacked it. The giant whelk remembered that battle, remembered hiding in a crevice with her shell broken and ichor leaking out around her, attracting prill. She remembered the death screams, then a long silence before finally her parent’s shell tumbled down the slope past her, utterly cleaned out. She stayed in the crevice until her own shell healed, feeding on anything that got close enough. Then she emerged and dragged herself down to rejoin her own kind below.
The giant whelk again studied the hook and saw that quickly forming scar tissue had sealed it in place. Whipping her tentacle back she observed the line looping above her. Different movements of her tentacle caused changing patterns in the line: there a sine wave travelling its length, and there an endlessly revolving coil. These patterns pleased her, and rather than tear the hook out, she drew the line back and wrapped it around her tentacle.
8
Packetworms:
these segmented worms obtain most of their nutrition by boring through compacted mud layers and sedimentary rock. It is theorized that the evolutionary pressures driving them into this lifestyle were in force before the rise of the leeches. A billion years ago, after five billion years of competitive evolution and no mass extinctions, Spatterjay was seemingly overburdened with life, resulting in every possible niche being competed for and exploited. Few people have actually seen living specimens of this creature, its home environment being far below the seabed, but they do make their presence known. The casts they throw up—of ground rock, calcined limestone and clay—are of a similar composition to cement, and set as hard. And since some packetworms grow to two metres wide and fifty long, those worm casts can be large enough to protrude from the ocean surface. Their almost cubic configuration has in the past caused them to be mistaken for the ruined buildings of some alien race, and they form the foundations of many atolls and even some islands on Spatterjay. The packetworm’s physical biology, working five degrees hotter than that of most other native forms, and being highly acidic, is inimical to the Spatterjay virus -
The SMs numbered six to ten, in their standard format geosurvey shells, were not built for speed as that was not necessary for them to catch or escape rocks. Each of them measured two metres from top to base, and about a metre wide. If they bore a resemblance to anything, it was, with numerous blocky additions, to ancient paraffin tilley lamps sprayed sky green. They were also now devoid of the ‘attitude’ program they had run while occupying enforcer shells and attacking the Prador ship ten years ago. They were also unarmed.