And there was a bare possibility that he might survive if he closed his mantle, tightly about him and waited until all the ranks had passed. He could then bring up the rear . . . and, possibly, just possibly, there would be sufficient food left to enable him to reach the winter feeding grounds.
And it might still be possible to cross the disc. There was enough warmth in it to keep him active. By working all night he might be able to build a path of sand across its surface and thus keep his tissues from being seared by the metal. He would be technically violating the law by moving ahead of the others, but if he did not feed ahead, no harm would be done.
He moved closer to the barrier and began to pile sand against its base, sloping it to make a broad ramp to the top of the disc. The work was slow and the sand was slippery. The polished grains slipped away and the ramp crumbled time after time. But he worked on, piling up sand until it reached the top of the disc. He looked across the flat surface that stretched before him.
Fifty raads!
It might as well be fifty zets. He couldn’t do it. Already his energy level was so low that he could hardly move, and to build a raad-wide path across this expanse of metal was a task beyond his strength. He drooped across the ramp, utterly exhausted. It was no use. What he ought to do was open his mantle to Emptiness.
He hadn’t felt the communication filaments of Caada and Varsi touch him. He had been too busy, but now with Caada’s burst of glee, and Varsi’s cynical, “A noble decision, Ul Kworn. You should be commended,” he realized that they knew everything.
His body rippled hopelessly. He was tired, too tired for anger. His energy was low. He contemplated Emptiness impassively. Sooner or later it came to all Folk. He had lived longer than most, and perhaps it was his time to go. He was finished. He accepted the fact with a cold fatalism that he never dreamed he possessed. Lying there on the sand, his mantle spread wide, he waited for the end to come.
It wouldn’t come quickly, he thought. He was still far from the cellular disorganization that preceded extinction. He was merely exhausted, and in need of food to restore his energy.
With food he might still have an outside chance of building the path in time. But there was no food. He had gleaned his area completely before he had ever reached the roadblock.
Lying limp and relaxed on the ramp beside the barrier, he slowly became conscious that the metal wasn’t dead. It was alive! Rhythmic vibrations passed through it and were transmitted to his body by the sand.
A wild hope stirred within him. If the metal were alive it might hear him if he tried to communicate. He concentrated his remaining reserves of energy, steeled himself against the pain and pressed a communication filament against the metal.
“Help me!” he projected desperately. “You’re blocking my strip! I can’t pass!”
Off to one side he sensed Varsi’s laughter and on the other felt Caada’s gloating greed.
“I cannot wake this metal,” he thought hopelessly as he tried again, harder than before, ignoring the pain of his burning flesh.
Something clicked sharply within the metal, and the tempo of the sounds changed.
“It’s waking!” Kworn thought wildly.
There was a creaking noise from above. A rod moved out from the cylinder and twisted into the ground in Varsi’s territory, to the accompaniment of clicking, grinding noises. A square grid lifted from the top of the cylinder and began rotating. And Kworn shivered and jerked to the tremendous power of the words that flowed through him. They were words, but they had no meaning, waves of sound that hammered at his receptors in an unknown tongue he could not understand. The language of the Folk had changed since the days of the ancients, he thought despairingly.
And then, with a mantle-shattering roar, the cylinders jutting overhead spouted flame and smoke. Two silvery balls trailing thin, dark filaments shot out of the great cylinder and buried themselves in the sand behind him. The filaments lay motionless in the sand as Kworn, wrapped defensively in his mantle, rolled off the ramp to the ground below.
The silence that followed was so deep that it seemed like Emptiness had taken the entire land.
Slowly Kworn loosened his mantle. “In the name of my first ancestor,” he murmured shakily, “what was that?” His senses were shocked and disorganized by the violence of the sound. It was worse even than the roar and scream of the samshin that occasionally blew from the south, carrying dust, lichens, feeders and even Folk who had been too slow or too foolish to hide from the fury of the wind.
Gingerly, Kworn inspected the damage to his mantle. It was minor. A tiny rip that could easily be repaired, a few grains of sand that could be extruded. He drew himself together to perform the repairs with the least possible loss of energy, and as he did, he was conscious of an emanation coming from the filaments that had been hurled from the cylinder.
Food!
And such food!
It was the distilled quintessence of a thousand purple feeders! It came to his senses in a shimmering wave of ecstasy so great that his mantle glowed a bright crimson. He stretched a pseudopod toward its source, and as he touched the filament his whole body quivered with anticipation. The barrier was blotted from his thoughts by an orgy of shuddering delight almost too great for flesh to endure. Waves of pleasure ran through his body as he swiftly extended to cover the filament. It could be a trap, he thought, but it made no difference. The demands of his depleted body and the sheer vacuole-constricting delight of this incredible foodstuff made a combination too potent for his will to resist, even if it had desired to do so. Waves of pleasure rippled through him as more of his absorptive surface contacted the filament. He snuggled against it, enfolding it completely, letting the peristaltic rushes sweep through him. He had never fed like this as long as he could recall. His energy levels swelled and pulsed as he sucked the last delight from the cord, and contemplated the further pleasure waiting for him in that other one lying scarcely twenty raads away.
Sensuously, he extended a pseudopod from his upper surface and probed for the other filament. He was filled to the top of his primary vacuole but the desire for more was stronger than ever—despite the fact that he knew the food in the other filament would bring him to critical level, would force him to reproduce. The thought amused him. As far back as he could remember, no member of the Folk had ever budded an offspring during the Time of Travel. It would be unheard of, something that would go down through the years in the annals of the Folk, and perhaps even cause a change in the Law.
The pseudopod probed, reached and stopped short of its goal. There was nothing around it but empty air.
Fear drove the slow orgasmic thoughts from his mind. Absorbed in gluttony, he hadn’t noticed that the filament had tightened and was slowly drawing back into the cylinder from whence it came. And now it was too late! He was already over the rim of the metal disc.
Feverishly, he tried to disengage his absorptive surfaces from the filament and crawl down its length to safety, but he couldn’t move. He was stuck to the dark cord by some strange adhesive that cemented his cells firmly to the cord. He could not break free.
The line moved steadily upward, dragging him inexorably toward a dark opening in the cylinder overhead. Panic filled him! Desperately he tried to loosen his trapped surfaces. His pseudopod lashed futilely in the air, searching with panic for something to grip, something to clutch that would stop this slow movement to the hell of pain that waited for him in the metal high overhead.
His searching flesh struck another’s, and into his mind flooded the Ul Caada’s terrified thought. The old one had reacted quicker than he, perhaps because he was poaching, but like himself he was attached and could not break free.