He thought for a moment that perhaps he could spare Kanti that by pretending, or perhaps even reversing—No, if he changed back, he’d risk the same thing happening again when and if Kanti found something better, and if he pretended, the relationship would be an act on his part—a false, comic farce. He smiled at the girl. “I don’t dislike you, I care about you, I’m your friend—maybe we can leave it there?”
Her eyes were glistening. “Crap,” she said, then took a breath. “OK. I can deal with it. The Uther don’t form couples either. Hardly think about sex out of season. Maybe it helps you understand them.”
“Well, maybe.” Greg shrugged. “Now, let’s try to think of a way out of here?”
They both sat and thought. Greg tried to think about the problem, but fatigue and other thoughts took his energy. He slumped against the stone wall to be more comfortable, and finally lay down on the sand. The light was almost completely gone.
Someone was shaking him. “Greg, Greg, wake up.”
He was not in his alcove on the island. He was—gravel—Kanti. “Uh, sorry. Fell asleep.”
“Look. Since we don’t have wings, the Uthers don’t think we can fly. Right?”
Greg blinked hard. She woke him up for that? He shook his head. “That doesn’t seem surprising.”
“I can dunk a basketball here. That’s three meters. If you throw me up at the same time, maybe I could get another half meter or so. I think that’s enough to reach the second floor window sills.”
Greg looked at her. She wasn’t particularly tall, but he’d seen women not much taller jump that high on Earth—and they had only three-quarters Earth gravity here.
He tested his arms—they were sore, but seemed to have recovered their strength.
“I guess it’s worth a try. It could smart a little, crashing into that stone wall.”
Kanti puckered her lips. “I can handle it.”
“What window should we try?”
She smiled. “Maybe one of the ones near my latrine?”
Greg laughed. “For all we know, these carrion-eating Uthers might like the smell. But it’s on the opposite side of this building. After we get up, we have to get down, and that looks like a three or four meter fall from the balconies on this side.”
Kanti gestured to their rations. “We need something to carry this in.”
Greg thought a moment, then patted his stomach. “Let’s carry it here. They say food is sleep, and we won’t be getting much. In fact, we should rest a little now, until it’s darker.”
They broke out the food and stuffed themselves. Then they lay down in the gravel.
Kanti shook him. He hadn’t meant to be out so completely again, but it was probably just as well. When he had his wits about him, they stole out into the courtyard.
Kanti’s spot of fertilizer was actually between the ranks of windows, and any odor had long since vanished. They chose the window to the left. With Kanti’s heels on his shoulders, her toes in his hands, and one hand on the wall for balance, they both crouched. On ‘‘three,” he jumped up, and she jumped as soon as she felt him move. It finished with his pushing her toes up and away.
Surprisingly, in view of how the rest of the last twenty-four hours had gone, Kanti reached the window ledge on the first throw. She was able to find sufficient purchase on the walls with her shoes to lever herself up enough to get an elbow up. Then, like a human snake of some sort, she slithered in over the window sill and thumped into the pitch black room.
Greg waited in the courtyard below. If an Uther looked in on him, there was no sign of it. Eventually he leaned against the wall.
Something was brushing his face. He opened his eyes—an electrical cord. He looked up. It was pitch black, with nothing but starlight coming down the well of the five-story Uther building, but enough to see by—two bright planets were overhead.
He pulled on the cord. It jerked back. Clear enough. He pulled steadily, then put his full weight on it. OK. Only four meters or so, he told himself. He’d seen people go up whole mountains this way, but he’d never done it. It wasn’t pretty—he leaned back and got his feet on the wall, then kind of duck-waddled up a foot at a time, advancing hand over hand on the cord until he finally got his legs over the sill. His arms burned with the effort.
The room was a mechanical shop of sorts—with what felt like lathes and presses. They couldn’t really see anything clearly. The cord Kanti had found was still attached to its machine, which, presumably, was bolted to the floor. There was one bank of outlets on a far wall, which, presumably, was why the cord was so long. Electricity had been added to this building long after it had been built.
After a couple of minutes for him to catch his breath, they went out to the balcony.
Four meters down on this side, too. But they had the electrical cord.
Three hours later, they’d managed to steal several kilometers downhill from the Uther building, and Greg stopped at an open place on a small hill to take a look at the sky. Borvo, almost as bright as Jupiter from Earth, approached the horizon, still bright enough to shine through the thin, luminescent clouds. It set about 0300 local time—without a large moon, Eponans of all sorts used the giant planet to time the night. He looked a quarter turn right of Borvo, trying to find a hole through the canopy of pagoda trees along the horizon.
“There, Crux! That’s north,” he finally said. The Southern Cross in Earth’s sky, Crux lay near Epona’s north pole. So downhill was roughly west, toward the field of camouflaged spacecraft. They had probably been managing a couple of kilometers an hour over easy, if squishy, terrain.
“Does it look that way from Earth?” Kanti asked.
Her question sent a twinge of nostalgia through Greg, and then a touch of wonder as he remembered Kanti was a human who had never been to Earth.
“Pretty much,” Greg answered. “Its nearest bright star is a couple of hundred light-years away—a shift of twenty-one light years doesn’t make that much difference. But it’s a northern cross here.”
Kanti sighed. “Sometimes I feel homesick for Earth, which is silly because I’ve never been there—and if I did go, I’d probably feel homesick for here. Makes me wonder if I belong anywhere.”
Greg touched her shoulder. “Someday, maybe, you’ll visit one of those stars, and look back to find that the distance between Epona and Earth is less than the width of your hand.”
He stuck his hand out to illustrate the point.
“Oof!” With no warning at all, something clamped onto his arm like a vice. Kanti’s “Look out!” and a rustle of round leaf penetrated his attention well after the bite. Something that looked like a cross between an alligator and a clam was trying to saw its way through the arm of his bodysuit. A single long, muscular leg flailed away in the air. Greg, instinctively, kept his arm out stiff, keeping the leg and its single claw away from his lower body.
“Springcroc!” Kanti finished her warning. Then she grabbed the upper “jaw” from behind the thing while Greg grabbed the lower one with his other hand and pulled.
An audible crack ended the drama—the thing’s upper carapace fractured and bent up, releasing Greg’s arm. At the same time, the springcroc started shaking like a leaf, then went still.
“You OK?” Kanti asked.
Greg tested his arm. “Sore as hell, but it still works. Look at that thing!”
“It’s dead.” Kanti said, kicking it to make sure. “The cracked shell went into its brain, right between the eyes. It wouldn’t have lived long anyway—look, its eyes were rotting away—it probably couldn’t even see what you were. We were lucky to get it off.”