“How did you get out when you were a kid?”
She sighed. “The other kids lifted the shell.”
They would have had to stick their hands right through the outer mantle—but snail flesh parted easily. Maybe… “Maybe we can lift it from the inside?”
“Yuck.” That was heartfelt, but somehow sounded hopeful. “But I think it will work.”
“I agree. Yuck. Let’s get going.”
They eased off their perches and forced their boots through the rubbery slime. With effort, they moved toward the “rear” of the shell.
“Will this kill it?” Greg asked. It seemed they were doing hideous damage to its innards.
“You don’t kill a giant snail. The question is, are we strong enough to lift this shell and tear our way out before it kills us. It took five kids, as I remember.”
“Right. Well, as I see it, to get the edge we have to thrust our hands through this goo—” a springcroc skull stared at him, eyeless—“lift the edge, and then duck our heads through, under and out.”
“Right.” She said. “I’m ready.”
“OK,” he said.
“On the count of three?” she asked.
“Right…”
She started and he joined in. “One… two… three.”
He took a deep breath and shoved his hands through the slippery wet folds of the snail’s stomach. They started burning immediately. He forced them through and out, found and grabbed the rim of the shell. It was slippery and burned, but he hung on, bent his legs, and lifted. Gradually, with an ugly sucking sound, the rim rose with the snail flesh stretching into a mucous curtain between the rim and the main body below. Kanti grunted, straining on the verge of tears. Waist level was as high as they could get the edge of the snail.
“You go first. I’ll hold it up for you. Then you try to slow its fall while I duck through. Hurry.”
Without a word, she plunged her head into the snails stretched stomach wall and struggled through it. When he felt her lifting again from the outside, he took another breath, shut his eyes, and butted his way through it, too.
The goo clung to him momentarily, then he tumbled free outside—the curtain of flesh was thinner than it looked. He didn’t dare open his eyes. A hand put some roundleaf in his and started scrubbing him. He immediately started wiping the slime off his face and hair, then his hands. Gradually the burning feeling departed. He would, he figured, end up with a hell of a rash.
When he finally risked opening his eyes, he found that Kanti had finished cleaning herself and was laying a trail for the snail to take it away from where they were. She looked at him and shivered, then smiled. “Yuck.”
He smiled back at her. “At least we’ve got a tale to tell.”
“Yeah. Which ship are we going to steal… or blow up?”
“They all look the same. The Uther must have an assembly line somewhere. Uh, that one.” He pointed at one of bullet shaped “pagoda tree” trunks at random. Up close, the camouflage wasn’t really that good—a canopy of fine mesh screen braced with sticks of what Greg assumed was fiberglass and painted to look something like a pagoda tree canopy when viewed from above. No, he thought at second look. That was probably a real pagoda tree canopy on top of the screen, cut from some tree. In this season, it would be hard to tell a dead one from a dormant one.
With a start, Greg realized he could actually see the Uther rocket; a glance at the sky revealed only the brighter stars and planets. Dawn was approaching. “Let’s go,” he said.
They ran for the spacecraft, or as close to doing so as they could—the roundleaves were dense and tugged at their feet. The ground beneath was soft and squishy. They made progress, but ten meters from the rocket, the ground suddenly exploded in front of them with a burst of light and a deafening sound. They hit the roundleaf.
Before they looked up, they felt the backwash of Utheran wings above them. Triads of Utheran tone language rained down on them.
“It’s Bach,” Kanti said, her voice breaking ever so slightly. “It says ‘Last song, us human must now sing.’ ”
The Uther glided down out of the dark to a five point landing in front of them and smoothly assumed a high dominant posture with its gun pointed at the humans.
Greg stepped in front of Kanti and braced himself. He had to try to disarm the Uther, then…
Kanti touched his arm. “I, I don’t think we should panic—if we really had to be dead, we would be already. It’s just stating his opening position. It’ll listen, I think.” Kanti was still trembling, but her voice was firm. “Sit down. Now!”
Greg sat. Kanti got down on all fours and sang six triplets. “I said, ‘Right things for all, we humans try to do. Sorry to parent humans, this human is.’ Understand? It knows a little human body language, so try not to look dangerous.”
Greg crossed his legs and held his hands out. It must have worked because the Uther didn’t shoot. Something immediately started trying to gnaw on his boot. He ignored it. Could they just keep the Uther listening long enough to think of something? “Kanti,” he whispered, “tell it to spare us and we’ll leave, and we won’t let them know it let us go. Surely it doesn’t want to kill you. It’s lived with people all its life—try asking it to trust us.”
Bach raised his gun and took aim.
“Huh?”
“Shut up!” Kanti looked at Greg in horror and shook her head. “We’re not in the same flock anymore. That’s a terrible insult, taking it for a fool; and it knows some English. You’re lucky it didn’t kill us right away. Leave this to me, please.”
How many times, Greg thought, had he mentioned trust to Uthers in the course of arranging support for human investigators? Such mentions, he recalled, evoked indifference—a sophisticated Uther tolerance, he now realized, for bad manners. He’d considered himself an expert on Uthers—and compared to Anna, he was. But he hadn’t lived with them like Kanti.
Kanti began singing triads, but the muzzle of the gun stayed pointed.
Bach returned Kanti’s song—Greg thought he could even recognize some motes.
Instead of translating, Kanti sang again. Greg shuddered, utterly helpless in the plants and muck while his fate was being decided in a language he did not understand. He still had thoughts of rushing the Uther—they were relatively slow and weak on the ground, but their reactions were very, very good.
The Uther lowered the gun and motioned to the spacecraft.
“What?” Greg asked, in wonder. “You talked it into letting us go?”
“No, that kind of pleading doesn’t work.” She set off for the spacecraft.
Greg followed her, with a look back to Bach, who was walking behind on the three-fingers of his rear wing in a way that should have been as clumsy as a human on crutches, especially in the roundweed, but somehow wasn’t. Instead, the Uther seemed to flow forward, the folds of its furled rear wings draping down like a skirt and giving the impression of a medieval bishop in robes. Greg had never seen an Uther take this dominant moving posture with humans before. Perhaps, he thought, it was for the benefit of any other Utheran sentries who might be watching.
“It’s not letting us go? But it hasn’t killed us. What did you do?” Greg asked.
“I bribed it. I promised that it could go to Earth and hear Bach played on the original acoustic instruments. I promised it membership in our flock, if our airlords agree.”
An Uther on a starship? Was that a promise that they could keep? “Why the gun?”
“It’s not a fool—it’ll hold the power of life or death over us until we fulfill our part of the bargain.”
“I see.” This was, in some respect, more of a kidnapping and hijacking than an altruistic aiding of friends—but, of course, that was how a human thought. The Uther, who had already deserted one flock for survival, was simply doing the same for fresher meat. “If we don’t take it?”