«Irvane made a mistake,» Jang said. «For most of his life, he pursued his hobbies among children he found aboard various Holding Arks, children who were desperate for any form of subsidy, no matter the source or the cost. Children who could see Irvane as a benefactor, despite his unpleasant attentions. But in a thoughtless moment, he initiated an inappropriate relationship with the young son of Angus Drimm, the notorious Howlytown magnate from Dilvermoon.»
Hu Moon raised her eyebrows. «Odd that he survived. One hears stories about Drimm and his kind.»
«Evidently he thought it best to depart Dilvermoon for a time. Perhaps Irvane hoped to be among Drimm's less important enemies by the time he returned from Graylin.» Jang sat and shook his head. «Personally, I think his strategy was poorly considered.»
«Maybe Irvane was killed by Howlytown enforcers,» Dueine said fearfully.
I sighed. Hu Moon rolled her eyes. Only Jang was kind enough to explain. «I think not,» he said. «Whatever the creatures were, they were not human, or members of any other sapient species of which I'm aware.»
A thick uneasy silence followed, as each of us considered the matter in our own way. Dueine's eyes watered and her plump lower lip trembled. Hu Moon maintained a stony expression, though she seemed to have developed a small twitch under one large eye, and Jang was, as always, still and self-contained. I felt an odd anxious relief. I'd been proven right. There was something to fear, here on this dull little world, and I had been the first one to feel it. Leeson had noticed something that four uncrippled people had missed. Well, Jang had sensed something. Maybe the others, too, and they just hadn't felt the need to talk to me about it.
«I don't understand,» Dueine said. «What does this have to do with how he died? How Flash died?»
Hu Moon spoke impatiently to her protégé. «Didn't you see the creatures? Terrible children, weren't they?»
Insight widened Dueine's eyes. «Oh,» she said.
Jang nodded. «It's my guess that the dead giant and the terrible children were the creation of their victims. They imagined them into existence, somehow. I don't know how this is possible, but we all saw the creatures.» Jang's soft voice changed slightly, took on a barely perceptible dramatic edge, a tone I had never heard from him. «We seem to have fallen into a fairy tale.»
A question occurred to me. «How did Flash imagine such a monster? He was brainburned.»
Jang looked at me. «The brainburning procedure used with criminals like Flash is unsophisticated. It's only necessary to subtract volition. No one bothers with the fine details. No one cares enough about them to weed away former obsessions from icicle convicts– who cares what they think about, so long as they are incapable of acting? Any associated suffering is well-deserved, most people say.»
I don't think he was speaking about me.
«Besides,» Hu Moon said, «Flash wasn't killed by his monster. Or not directly.»
«A point,» said Jang. «But he got to see it, it would seem, and his excitement reached a fatal level. Another point: Irvane went willingly with his children– they didn't touch him until he left the perimeter.» He paused. «I think we're safe inside the perimeter... but I'll set up more gun pods.»
The longest silence yet followed. I suppose they were all wondering about the things that might be birthed from their darkest imaginings. Wondering if those things could kill us.
Finally Hu Moon shook her head. «Well, we're not criminals, Dueine and I. We should be safe.»
I looked away. I felt immune, of course, and somehow desolate.
EVENTUALLY WE TURNED our attention to the day's accumulation of decoded records. The colony computer's memory stack had been more heavily damaged on the uppermost layers, and as we approached the end of the record, the images began to deteriorate in quality. The video enhancement was unsatisfactory. Whenever the computer was forced to bridge over a bad segment, the video had that plastic antiseptic quality that inevitably marks computer reconstruction. Some segments were entirely inaccessible and caused odd jumps in the video. The computer sometimes added informative captions to the more obscure scenes.
That night we watched a funeral. One adult and a child were laid out beside a hole large enough for both, the bodies wrapped tightly in gray ship-issue cloth. The other colonists stood about the burial site, wearing solemn faces, heads bowed, listening to a chaplain who spoke beside the hole, his eyes wide, his gestures dramatic, his gray dreadlocks flying. His audience seemed nervous, their eyes furtive. Those at the fringes of the crowd seemed especially uneasy, occasionally turning to glance at the empty wilderness behind them.
The chaplain finished his eulogy and the bodies were carefully lowered into the hole. Two men came forward with shovels and began to fill the grave. Some of the nearest mourners sobbed, but most of the colonists hurried away, their eyes anxious.
The computer skipped ahead, until the hole was full and only three mourners remained.
One was Suhaili the Pipemaker, wearing a black mourning veil that hid her expression. Across the grave a tall man with harsh features held the hand of a small child. His face was wooden with loss; the child was too young for anything but confusion and fear.
She spoke to the man; he looked away without replying. She raised a hand in a pleading gesture, but he turned and marched out of the camera's frame. Suhaili stood alone above the grave, and after a moment she covered her face with her hands and her shoulders began to shake. The camera operator receded, until she was a tiny figure against the gray landscape.
Jang went to the console and shut down the holotank. «Enough of that,» he said.
In my shelter that night, when the camp was silent, I tried my hand at making a drawing of the giantess. The stylus flew over the slate with surprising ease as I sketched a rough charcoal of the thing... screaming, wide-mouthed, in mid-stagger, with arms lifted in horrid entreaty. I felt nothing but a growing sickness in my stomach. I formed no connection with the image I was making, other than the weighing of light and dark, the calculations of angles and lines, the mechanical addition of texture, all premeditated, lifeless, meaningless movements of my hand. I felt what must have been a pale echo of the sort of grief I'd once felt watching a holovid of a dear lost lover. The watchers in my brain must have been busy.
At breakfast, Hu Moon announced that we would continue with the dig. She was moody, but definite. «I see no reason to waste the University's funds by returning to Dilvermoon now. We've had a death among our group.
«Naturally we're upset, but such things sometimes happen on wild worlds. I won't abandon my responsibilities because of some foolish theory.»
She gave Jang a dark look, but his face was placid and he nodded. «You're the expedition leader,» he said. «It's your decision.»
«Yes, it is,» she said firmly. «This will mean more work, but I'm sure we'll all compensate. Leeson, you'll run the materials analyzer today. Dueine will tend the mapping mech.»
Dueine pouted. «But I meant to update my journals today. So much has happened.»
Hu Moon had no patience with her protege. «Things have changed,» she snapped. Dueine's eyes seemed to water, but she nodded submissively.
Later I handed my drawing to Jang. He took it with a murmur of thanks, but made no comment, for which I was grateful.
During the following days we found more of the pipes carved from the white stone, though the one Irvane had kept seemed to have disappeared. The pipes were often stylized little effigies, slewed into some disturbing shape. There was one pipe with a bowl carved to resemble a head with tangled hair and a mouth ringed with inward-hooking needle teeth– a lamprey eel in human form. We found several well-made turtle pipes, each with a face carved into its back, and each face presented a different emotion in starkly stylized form: terror, joy, sexual abandon, grief. Whenever we discovered a pipe made of the white stone that I'd taken from the fragments of the dead giantess, Jang put them into a security locker, to which only he and Hu Moon had access.