They hit the ground in a tangle amongst the falling fragrant fecal confetti. The leviathan threw back its head and trumpeted a gobbling cry of pure unconstipated joy, swung around to give him a thankful lick with a mattress-sized pink tongue, then began galumphing gleefully away.
“Claire! Are you all right?” Arthur demanded, hauling her up from a sparkling lavender drift and shaking her. She wiped her face and spat, gave him a loopy grin, then grabbed him by the ears and fastened her mouth to his.
After she let go, and while Arthur was wiping his own mouth and spitting, she staggered to her feet. “Come on, my hero,” she panted. “We have to get back out of sight!”
He gaped up at her in confusion, wondering how she could make such an abrupt switch from chewing on his tonsils to ordering him around. “What—” he began, “I don’t—”
“No time,” she huffed, dragging him to his feet. “The indigenes aren’t supposed to know we’re here, remember?” She tightened her grip on his hand and began towing him back toward their ship.
Arthur let her, obscurely pleased that things had so quickly returned to normal.
As she had predicted, a dozen of the locals came running onto the scene less than a minute after they were back inside and recloaked. Arthur peeled off the envirosuit and wiped his face, and Claire scraped clods of dung off while watching the beings mill around the clearing, demonstrating the nearly universal humanoid signs for confusion by scratching their hairless heads and shrugging their thin shoulders. After a few minutes they gave up and headed back toward the way they had come, adding bemused head-shaking to the roster of gestures they shared with their clandestine observers. The Whugg system could have translated what they were saying, but it would have been redundant.
“OK Claire, I think you’d better tell me what the hell you thought you were doing!” Arthur said in the most commanding tone he could muster once the aliens were out of sight. He even flung down his towel for emphasis.
She responded by giving him the hairy eyeball, hands on her hips. “You’ve been drinking, haven’t you? You know you can’t hold hard liquor.”
“Well, maybe I did have one or—” He blinked, then scowled. “Don’t go changing the subject, dammit! Why the bloody hell did you go out there and let yourself get eaten? That was the dumbest, most—most—” Words failed him and he flung up his hands in baffled outrage.
“Oh, getting eaten was safe enough,” she answered mildly. “My only miscalculation was in my ability to get off the bus.”
The look he gave her suggested that he suspected brain damage. “Off the bus? What the hell are you babbling about, woman?”
Claire lifted an arm and sniffed, made a face. “Yuck! I smell like—well, you know. Tell you what. You wash your face and hands then make us something to eat while I take a shower. After we get some breakfast—” she glanced at her watch, “—better make that brunch, in us then we can talk. OK?”
“I guess,” he allowed. She was pretty rank, and his body throbbed with a need for coffee to replace spent adrenaline.
“Thanks. You’re a prince.” She leaned over to peer at the various readouts, then regarded him with one raised eyebrow. “You were tracking my leviathan. You weren’t plotting some sort of drunken macho revenge, were you?”
He couldn’t look her in the eye. “Well…” he began.
A knowing grin appeared. “Of course not. What was I thinking?” She raised her voice. “System. Use previously employed methods to extrapolate the probable position of the leviathan that swallowed Professor Whalsitz.”
Arthur’s eyes went wide with realization. “Wait a minute! You got eaten and you’re still alive! Do you think Maud might be?”
She shook her head, flakes of leviathan dung falling from her hair like lavender dandruff. “I doubt it. We’ll know for sure soon enough. Now get making some coffee and food, would you, love? I’ve had kind of a crappy morning.”
Arthur watched her head for the bathroom, tom between aggravation at being left in the dark and ordered around, and a tremendous sense of relief that he had her back again.
The sense of relief was greater. Probably almost as profound as that poor leviathan had felt to be rid of her.
Chuckling to himself he went to wash, and then whip up a brunch worthy of the occasion.
“OK,” Claire said after swallowing the last bite of her fifth Belgian waffle and putting down her fork. “Now I’m ready to be debriefed.” She lounged back in her chair and regarded him from under lowered lashes. “Or maybe you would rather I answered some of your questions instead.”
“Keep your briefs on,” he replied tartly, refilling their coffee cups. “And tell me how you could so blithely decide to let an alien monster eat you. Because if it’s something medication can fix, I’m getting you a prescription.”
“I knew it was safe, and I wanted to find out why Maud let one eat her.”
“Safe.” He shook his head. “We’ll hash that one out later. Did you figure out what Maud was up to?”
“I sure did. And it was safe. Maud’s recordings and a couple other things let me figure out what she had, namely the indigenes’ relationship with the leviathans. I knew that getting swallowed wasn’t as bad as it looked. The locals do it all the time.”
“But why?”
She beamed at him. “For the same reason the chicken crossed the road.”
Arthur could feel his headache coming back. “To get to the other side?” he grated, unamused by the punch line.
“Precisely. Maud had done some high-altitude survey work before touching down, and what she saw then indicated that the indigenes, though completely cut off from each other by the nearly airless ridges between their inhabitable pits, hadn’t stagnated or diverged genetically. That indicated the direct or indirect transfer of genetic material. How? Only one creature here was capable of crossing the barriers, and did so on a regular basis. That was the leviathans.”
“She never mentioned that,” Arthur put in.
“Maud withheld a lot of things—and had been doing so for some time now, releasing only those findings which wouldn’t point to whatever artifacts and information she’d been pilfering.”
Arthur paled and almost dropped his cup. “Maud was stealing from sites?”
“Every chance she got. Now let’s get back to the leviathans. Anatomically speaking, they’re a muscular, bone-reinforced tube surrounding a single huge combination stomach and lung.”
“You mean they’re, um, hollow?”
“Pretty much. After you go in one’s mouth you pass through a funnel-shaped ring of muscle and emerge in a big open space. The walls are lined with the feathery, fan-shaped, gill-like structures that keep the air circulating and extract the gases they need. The floor is lined with interconnected muscular pits where the vegetation it eats is macerated and digested. As long as you watch where you step it’s fairly comfortable inside. There’s air and heat, some sort of bioluminescent light, and even a salad bar if you’re not too fussy. I’ve had worse plane rides.”
Arthur rubbed his jaw, intrigued. “You’re saying there’s a habitable space inside each animal.”
“I am, and if you think diat’s something, wait’ll you hear the rest. That huge lung allows the leviathans to hold their breath the whole time they cross from pit to pit, which makes them in essence self-powered, pressurized transport. So if a local wants to get to the other side, it just whistles one up and rides in style.”
“But how do they know where they’ll end up?”