Of course, in normal circumstances an adult Krinpit in shell was a match for a dozen of the Ghosts Below — as long as he could stay on the surface, or at least in sound of it. In the open, Ghosts Below seemed deaf, running almost at random. But these were not normal circumstances. Sharn-igon was not only weary; he felt sick. He felt irritable, tense, bloated — ready, he would have said to his he-wife (but Cheee-pruitt was months dead, his carapace dry), to stridulate and jump out of his shell. But it was not the right time for that. He was not due for many months yet, so it couldn’t be normal pre-molt tension.
Abruptly his sphincter loosened. He regurgitated everything he had eaten in a great flood — meat of deafworm, scraps of chitin of crabrat, half-digested fruits and fungi and leaves.
Vomiting left him weak but calm. After resting for a moment, he covered the mess over and then methodically began to clean his shell. No doubt the Poison Ghosts were taking revenge for being killed on the beach. It had to be their scraps of flesh still caught in Sharn-igon’s chelae that were making him ill. That — and the inner sickness that had claimed him when the Poison Ghosts first came to his city and began the remorseless chain of circumstance that had taken all joy from his life.
Krinpit did not cry. They had no tear ducts; they had no eyes to have tear ducts in. They did have the emotion of sorrow, and no culture-driven taboos against expressing it in their own way. That way was stillness. A quiet Krinpit — or as close to quiet as a Krinpit could get — was a weeping Krinpit.
For most of an hour, once he had polished the last dried particle of alien blood off his tympanum, Sharn-igon was nearly soundless: a rasp of claw against carapace, an occasional respiring moan, little else.
Unbidden, sounds of happier times echoed in his mind. He heard Cheee-pruitt again, and the little female — what was her name? — whom they had impregnated and who bore their young. She had been a dulcet creature. She had had almost a personality of her own, along with the bittersweet appeal of any mated female, her young growing and eating inside her until too much was destroyed and she died, and the brood polished her carapace clean and emerged to the loud, exciting world of their wife-father’s back.
But everything was changed now.
It was all the fault of the Poison Ghosts! Ever since the first of them had arrived and Cheee-pruitt — dear, lost Cheee-pruitt — had had the unwisdom to try to eat it, Sharn-igon’s world had fallen apart. Not just Cheee-pruitt, all of it. The Krinpit he had mobilized against the Poison Ghosts Dulla called Greasies had been punished severely. His own village-mates had been attacked from the air in reprisal, and so many of them were dead. And how many had he succeeded in killing in return? A few. Hardly any. The two on the beach, the handful that he and Dulla had surprised at the outpost — not enough! And all of Dulla’s plans had come to little: the Krinpit village nearest to the Fats had wavered and wobbled, promised to join in an attack and withdrawn the promise; and meanwhile all he and Dulla could do was skulk around like crabrats, looking for strays to attack and finding none. Until the two came out of their sinking vessel -
There was a sound from the water.
Sharn-igon froze. It was not possible for him to be wholly silent while he breathed at all, but he did his best.
He listened out of his shallow cave and heard a small, almost inaudible, blurred echo from the water. A coracle. And in it what seemed to be a Poison Ghost.
Another to kill? It was approaching. Sharn-igon thrust himself out of the cave and reared up to defend himself; and then he heard his own name shouted across the beach: “Sharn-igon!” And then those barbarous sounds that were the name of his mistrusted ally, or his truced foe: “OCK-med doo-LAH.”
He scuttled across the sand, half to greet Dulla, half still ready to kill, as Dulla yelled and pleaded. “Hurry! The Fats will be searching this whole coast. We must get out!”
With Sharn-igon aboard, the coracle rode very low in the water. It could not easily sink. Its cellular shell entrapped too much air for that. But it could swamp.
Crossing Broad Water it often did, and then both of them splashed and bailed and kept a watchful eye or ear for Ghosts Above until they could get under weigh again. The little sail helped them when the wind blew fair, but there was no keel. When the wind shifted, the sail had to come down and they had to paddle. It seemed to take forever; and Sharn-igon felt increasingly ill; and at every stroke or splash the grim recriminations continued.
“But for you, my he-wife would still be alive.”
“You are foolish, Sharn-igon. He tried to kill us; it is not our fault he died of it.”
“And my village was attacked, and another village destroyed entirely, and I myself am ill.”
“Speak of something else, Sharn-igon. Speak of the promises your Krinpit made to join in the attack on the Fats and how they broke them.”
“I will speak of my sorrow and my anger, Ahmed Dulla.”
“Then speak also of mine! We too have suffered in fighting with you against the common enemy.”
“Suffered?”
“Yes, suffered! Before my radio was destroyed — by you, Sharn-igon, by your clumsiness! — I could hear no voice from my camp. They may be dead, all of them!”
“How many, Ahmed Dulla?”
“A dozen or more!”
“A dozen or more of you have then died. Of us, how many? Of persons, two hundred. Of females, forty. Of backlings and infants—”
But it was not until they had crossed Broad Water and Sharn-igon heard the silence from his city that he perceived the immensity of the tragedy. There was no originated sound! There were only echoes — and what echoes!
Always before, when he crossed Broad Water, the city had presented a bustling, beautiful sound. Not this time. He heard nothing. Nothing! No drone of immature males at the waterfront shredding the fish catch. No songs from the mold-eaters on the Great White Way. No hammering of stakes to build new palisades on the made land on the point. He heard the echo of his own sounds faintly returning to him and recognized the shadowy outline of the mooring rocks, a few sheds, one or two boats, some structures half destroyed, a litter of empty carapaces. Nothing else.
The city was dead.
The Poison Ghost Dulla chattered worriedly to him, and Sharn-igon made out the words. “Another attack! The place is empty. The Greasies must have come back to finish the job.”
He could not reply. Stillness overcame him, a great, mourning silence so deep that even the Poison Ghost turned toward him in wonder. “Are you ill? What is happening?”
With great effort Sharn-igon scratched the words out on his tympanum. “You have killed my city and all my back-mates.”
“We? Certainly not! It could not have been the People’s Republics; we have not the strength anymore. It must have been the Greasies.”
“Against whom you vowed to protect us!” roared Sharn-igon. He rose on hind legs to tower over Dulla, and the Poison Ghost cringed in fear. But Sharn-igon did not attack. He threw himself forward, out of the coracle, with a broad splat that sent the waves dancing. The water was shallow here. Sharn-igon managed to keep some of his hind feet on the oozy bottom, while enough of his breathing pores were above the surface to keep him from drowning. He charged up the shoreline, scattering the littered water in a V of foam.
The tragedy made him still again, at every step and at each fresh echo. Dead! All dead. The streets empty except for abandoned carapaces, already dry. The shops untended. The homes deserted. Not a living male, not a female, not even any scrambling, chittering young.