Then she shook herself, hawked and spat on the ground, grinned and called, “Come to mamma.”
There was a sort of grim inevitability to what followed. Claire and Arthur watched Maud stand her ground before the oncoming behemoth. It huffed and snorted and made a beeline for her, all twelve legs pumping furiously and throwing up a cloud of ruddy dust behind it.
A second or two before that vast mouth was about to close over her, a look which suggested a profound train of second thoughts crossed Maud’s face. She stumbled back a step, the pod slipping from her fingers as she reached behind her.
A fraction of a second later the leviathan’s ground-scraping lower lip bowled her off her feet, and in she went like a rancid cream puff down a garbage disposal.
Arthur shuddered and looked away, on the verge of tossing his cookies.
Claire noisily munched another mouthful of popcorn.
The leviathan let out a joyous rooooooo! and galumphed onward without slowing.
Claire spat an old maid past her husband’s ear, dinging the unpopped kernel off the image of the leviathan’s retreating backside. “I thought you said they were vegetarians.”
He swallowed hard, his face faintly green. “Maud must have been wrong.” He managed a queasy smile. “Done in by her own sloppy work.”
She let this paean to perfectionism pass. “Was it just me, or did she want—or at least expect—to be eaten? Up until the last moment, anyway.”
“Remember what she said? Come to mamma.” He sighed and slumped back in the chair. “You’re the brain-picker. What do you figure? Suicide?”
Claire snorted. “Whaletits was too much of an egotist to kill herself.”
Arthur gazed up at his wife, an unspoken plea for some sort of logical explanation for what they had just witnessed in his eyes. Irrational behavior unnerved him, and although she provided him with a steady diet of it, he still counted on her to make the outlandish actions of others comprehensible. “Then why?”
“I don’t know,” she replied with uncharacteristic solemnity, reaching out to give his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “But don’t you worry. One way or another we’ll find out.”
Claire began that process by embarking on a slow, methodical search of Maud’s disheveled digs, efficiently tossing each room as she sought some small clue to what the woman had been up to. While she did that Arthur cleaned the place. She found nothing useful, but he netted $4.28 in lost change.
Three hours later they were back in their own blindship’s breakfast nook and finally sitting down to a late supper. As usual Arthur had done the cooking. Claire’s culinary skills were on the lethal side of nonexistent. He barely touched the meal he had prepared, still queasy from watching a colleague become a comestible. She ate with her usual gusto, wolfing down both her pork chops after drenching them in chunky red puddles of salsa. Her comments about the other white meat netted her one of his chops as well.
Over coffee and pie—Arthur had a slice of lemon and Claire had been in the mood for mincemeat—they got down to the business of deciding how to proceed. Arthur was holding out for calling it death by misadventure and pronouncing the case closed.
Claire overruled him. “We’re not done yet. There was some logical reason for what that old bat did, and I intend to find out what it was.”
“Pygs are wackos,” he argued. “Maybe she ate one cheesecake too many, her brain arteries clogged shut and she went completely off her rocker.”
“And decided that the leviathan was a pigeon and she was a nice tasty peanut?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Her actions were considered and purposeful.”
“You’re right,” he admitted with a glum sigh. “It’s just that thinking about it makes my brain hurt. We saw her dig up that pod and open it, an action which she seemed to know would call the leviathan right to her.”
“Whereupon it ate her. Which she also seemed to be expecting. But why would she—or anyone—want to get eaten?”
“Beats me.” He scowled and sat up straighten “Wait a minute. Let’s back up a bit. How did she know that the pods were leviathan lures?”
Claire stared at him a moment, then gave him a truly stunning smile. “Excellent question, my brainy darling. The only answer that comes to mind is monkey see, monkey do. She had to be mimicking behavior she’d observed here.”
“The indigenes?”
“Most likely.” She stood up and drained her mug. “I know it’s getting late, but I’d like you to start reviewing all the recordings Maud made. Somewhere in there she saw something that made her decide to become a leviathan’s lunch.”
He pushed back his chair. “Sure. What are you going to do?”
“Review her notes and logs. Look for clues there.”
He let out an evil chuckle. “Brace yourself, her work is always a mess. Even worse than your office. Anything else I should do?”
Claire yawned, then held out her empty mug hopefully. “Make more coffee?”
Claire found it of some note that there were next to no notes.
What few she did find were stored in the human-style computer on Maud’s craft. A linkup with their own equipment put several lines of gibberish on one of the piloting station’s screens. Claire studied it, recognizing an extremely heavy-duty military grade encryption.
“Sneaky bitch,” she muttered. “Both Arthur and I could whack you good for this.”
Maud’s secret notes had broken one of Why Not U’s most fundamental guidelines. The Whuggs wanted constant unfiltered feedback from the Expeditions, so all materials—observations, data, notes, and even wild guesses—were to be put into the Whugg computers which made Expeditions possible. Recordings could be stored in human machines, then the dull spots edited out for downloading on a day-to-day basis; although curious, they weren’t interested in staring at an unchanging view of the same rock or tree or solar body for hours on end. Since Whugg computers controlled the editing process, nothing useful got omitted.
The Whuggs’s semisentient organoform analogue of the computer was nothing like the glorified abaci humans had invented. It was a somewhat grainy, occasionally lumpy yellow mush that needed no power, input or output devices, software or twenty-four-hour tech support; its only basic requirement was a container capable of holding a material about the consistency of runny Cream of Wheat.
Humans had thought their computers and networks and cyberwhatevers were pretty dam cool until they were shown how to cook up what the Whuggs used, a process with some odd similarities to brewing beer. Apart from their awesome computational and seemingly infinite storage capabilities, anything entered into one was instantly accessible on all others in existence, no matter where they were. Not just locally, or globally, but everywhere—which included the Whugg home planet itself, which was quite a few doors down the galactic block. The ever-helpful Whuggs had made several attempts to explain the underlying mechanism for this instantaneous transfer of information over multiple light-years of distance before giving up and leaving it at Just because.
This allowed them to, among other things, communicate directly to any member of any Expedition at any time they wanted by way of the ship and lab computers. Having a Whugg take a personal interest in your work was a coveted, if quite often baffling-honor.
As a Fixer Claire had a gut-level understanding of something that went against the knotty grain of humans’ understanding of how things normally worked. Since all the Whugg computer-stuff was so uncannily linked, a dribble of it in a shot glass had the same awesome capabilities as enough to fill a swimming pool.