Then he realized what this meant to those who were sleeping. The worms would come up under them, burrow through their clothes, and—
He ran for the tent. “Wake! Wake!” he cried, reaching in to grab an ankle. It turned out to be Nona’s; her shapely leg lifted as she sat up. “Get on your feet,” he said urgently. “Quickly!”
In a moment both women were standing beside him. “Worms,” he exclaimed. “Bloodsuckers. Coming up through the ground. One stabbed me on the finger, and it won’t stop bleeding.” He showed his finger, which indeed was still leaking blood. He supplemented this with a mental picture of his experience.
Both women were staring blankly at him. Then he realized that the horse remained asleep; there was no translation. Colene could do a little, when she tried, but she wasn’t trying at the moment.
Actually Seqiro could be at risk too, and maybe Burgess. He walked to the horse and touched him on the shoulder. “Wake,” he said. “We have trouble.”
Then the minds of the others tuned in. Darius quickly rehearsed the matter for them all.
In a moment Colene had a torch and was looking inside the tent. “Ugh!” she exclaimed. “They’re coming up! Some are already in the bedding.”
“Now we know why other creatures aren’t sleeping here,” Nona remarked. “Those bloodsucker worms must be all through this forest.”
“But they weren’t by the shore,” Colene reminded her.
“Maybe there’s too much water there,” Darius offered. “Waterlogged soil drowns them out.” But of course the shears ranged there, by day.
“Will they be able to get through your hooves, Seqiro?” Colene inquired.
Three are trying, so far without success, the horse responded.
“What about you, Burgess?” she asked.
Burgess rested on the hard rim of his canopy, with none of his softer parts in contact with the ground; the worms could not get at him.
“And I guess they can’t get through our boots, either,” Colene concluded. “So we’re safe as long as we stay on our feet. What delight.”
“We can fashion an elevated bed,” Darius said.
“Say, yes! Because by the look of it, the worms can’t climb or jump; they just bore up through the sod and into any flesh that’s there. So we can balk them. Still, I’d rather be out of here. The forest has too many ugly surprises.”
Darius was in hearty agreement. He had felt safer on the Virtual Mode, despite its myriad traps.
Nona expanded the wooden sledge, until it was large enough for all three of them to lie on. “You take it now, with Nona,” Colene said to Darius. “I’m wide awake anyway.”
She kept putting him with Nona. He knew why: because it was Colene’s nature to take suicidal risks. He wished he could reverse that, and make her become a vessel of joy. But, with the worst irony yet, he feared she would then lose her fascination for him. He seemed to have as much of a destructive impulse as she did, when he related to her.
He climbed onto the sledge beside Nona and closed his eyes. Nona, appropriately, kept her thoughts blanked. It was an ability she had been practicing. Actually it was one they should all practice because it was better to have control than lack of control. So he concentrated on that. Nothing against you, Seqiro, he thought to the horse. I just want to know how.
IN the morning he found Colene beside him, cuddling close. She was asleep; he could tell, because Nona’s awake thoughts came to him, while Colene’s were of scattered bits of dreams. Impulsively he lifted his head and kissed her on her sleeping mouth. Somehow they would work things out. They had to.
She woke. “Hey, did you kiss me?” she demanded.
“I confess I did. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Can’t think of any way I’d rather be waked.” She lifted her head and kissed him back, hard.
They got through their morning routines, and got to work on the path up the slope. By noon they had something suitable. Then Nona shrank the sledge down to its prior size, and they put Burgess on it. Just to be sure he stayed put, they passed a cord up over his canopy, tying him down.
Darius expected difficulty, but it was surprisingly straightforward. Seqiro was a very large, powerful horse, eighteen hands, which meant that his shoulder was as high as the top of Darius’ head. When he set out to pull, he hauled the sledge and its burden up as if it were inconsequential. Before long they made it to the mesa. Darius hoped this would turn out to be a safe retreat for them.
And so it turned out to be. The predator worms evidently couldn’t get through the rock underlying the surface, and there were no creatures there. It was a vacant plain, as if just waiting for them to use it.
Nevertheless, they made a camp resembling a small fort, with an earthen rampart around it, and a fire trench. They dug down deep, looking for worm holes, just to be sure, then set the expanded sledge in place. None of them cared to take any further chances.
Nona expanded some water, and this at least turned out to be potable. Perhaps that was because it lacked any fibrous structure. Obviously the mass of an expanded object increased because it weighed more; it was just that if it had a rigid structure, it maintained it. That suggested that it was the internal structure of food that caused the problem, rather than the substance itself.
Their night was uneventful, though they kept guard as before. There were no worms, no flying predators, and no land-crawling monsters. Nona’s tame shear explored the mesa and the slopes around it, spying nothing. They foraged for fruit and nuts by making excursions down the path. They agreed that no one should go below alone, so they went as pairs selected from among Seqiro and the three human folk. Burgess could float freely across the mesa, but could not get off it by himself. Desiring to contribute sufficiently to the hive, he offered to do all of the night guarding, so that the others could sleep. But floaters could not move with confidence in darkness. They solved that problem by making several limited fires ringing the edge of the mesa; when Burgess knew it was level and safe within that broad circle of blazes, he was able to cope. If any monster came up on the mesa, he would be able to see its silhouette against one of the fires.
They remained for several days, getting thoroughly rested. Communication with Burgess improved, until problems were infrequent. Burgess, like Seqiro, required the contact of a human mind, in order to think like a human being. Unlike Seqiro, he also needed to be touched on a contact point, to establish mind contact. The horse and the floater together had no mental rapport; there had to be a human touching Burgess, who then brought the floater into the telepathic environment. Once they had worked out the exact nature of the limits, it became easy enough to maintain contact. Since it was the floater’s nature to constantly exchange information with each other person he encountered, for mutual updating, the three humans simply put their hands on his contact points, rather like the custom of shaking hands in Colene’s Earth Mode. Sometimes they all joined him, so that there were multiple contacts. It was possible for each of the three humans to communicate with him without Seqiro’s telepathy, but this was more limited, and of three different types. Colene did it with her own limited telepathy. Nona did it by relating to him as a familiar. Darius did it by doing a limited drawing and return of joy. Burgess could even serve as a partial mental linkage between humans when the horse was asleep. So their time on the mesa was well spent, in this respect. Now they could relate well to each other, and that could be important when they encountered some problem and had to react swiftly and with coordination.