Almost at once he heard a familiar snorting sound behind him. He turned and saw the ponderous yellow form of the elephant-camel looming up, with Jill sitting astride it just back of the front hump.
She leaned down and said, “You change your mind yet about wanting that ride?”
“I thought you were sore at me.”
“I am. Was. But it still seems crazy for you to be doing this on foot when I’ve got room up here for you.”
He stared up at her. You don’t often get second chances in this life, he told himself. But he wasn’t sure what to do.
“Oh, Christ,” she said, as he hesitated. “Do you want a ride or don’t you?”
Still he remained silent.
She shot him a quick wicked grin. “Still worried that I’m a Spook? You can check me out if you like.”
“I threw your gadget in the stream. I don’t like to have witch-things around me.”
“Well, that’s all right.” She laughed. “It wasn’t a charm at all, just an old power core, and a worn out one at that. It wouldn’t have told you anything.”
“What’s a power core?”
“Spook stuff. You could have taken it back with you to prove you were over here. Look, do you want a ride or not?”
It seemed ridiculous to turn her down again.
“What the hell,” Demeris said. “Sure.”
Jill spoke to the animal in what he took to be Spook language, a hiccuping wheeze and a long indrawn whistling sound, and it knelt for him. Demeris took her hand and she drew him on top of the beast with surprising ease. An openwork construction made of loosely woven cord, half poncho and half saddle, lay across the creature’s broad back, with the three humps jutting through. Her tent and other possessions were fastened to it at the rear. “Tie your pack to one of those dangling strings,” she said. “You can ride right behind me.”
He fitted himself into the valley between the second and third humps and got a secure hold on the weaving, fingers digging down deep into it. She whistled another command and the animal began to move forward.
Its motion was a rolling, thumping, sliding kind of thing, very hard to take. The sway was both lateral and vertical and with every step the ground seemed to rise and plunge around him in lunatic lunges. Demeris had never seen the ocean or any other large body of water, but he had heard about seasickness, and this was what he imagined it was like. He gulped, clamped his mouth shut, gripped the saddle even more tightly.
Jill called back to him, “How are you doing?”
“Fine. Fine.”
“Takes some getting used to, huh?”
“Some,” he said.
His buttocks didn’t have much padding on them. He could feel the vast bones of the elephant-camel grinding beneath him like the pistons of some giant machine. He held on tight and dug his heels in as hard as he could.
“You see those delta-winged things go by a little while ago?” she asked, after a while.
“The big dragons that were giving off the green smoke?”
“Right. Herders is what they are. On their way to Spook City for the hunt. They’ll be used to drive the game toward the killing grounds. Every year this time they get brought in to help in the round-up.”
“And the flying snakes?”
“They herd the herders. Herders aren’t very smart. About like dogs, maybe. The snake guys are a lot brighter. The snakes tell the herders where to go and the herders make the game animals go there too.”
Demeris thought about that. Level upon level of intelligence among these creatures that the Spooks had transported to the planet they had partly conquered. If the herders were as smart as dogs, he wondered how smart the snakes were. Dogs were pretty smart. He wondered how smart the Spooks were, for that matter.
“What’s the hunt all about? Why do they do it?”
“For fun,” Jill said. “Spook fun.”
“Herding thousands of exotic wild animals together and butchering them all at once, so the blood runs deep enough to swim through? That’s their idea of fun?”
“Wait and see,” she said.
They saw more and more transformation of the landscape: whorls and loops of dazzling fire, great opaque spheres floating just above ground level, silvery blades revolving in the air. Demeris glared and glowered. All that strangeness made him feel vulnerable and out of place, and he spat and murmured bitterly at each intrusive wonder.
“Why are you so angry?” she asked.
“I hate this weird shit that they’ve strewn all over the place. I hate what they did to our country.”
“It was a long time ago. And it wasn’t your country they did it to, it was your great-great-grandfather’s.”
“Even so.”
“Your country is over there. It wasn’t touched at all.”
“Even so,” he said again, and spat.
When it was still well before dark they came to a place where bright yellow outcroppings of sulphur, like foamy stone pillows, marked the site of a spring. Jill gave the command to make her beast kneel and hopped deftly to the ground. Demeris got off more warily, feeling the pain in his thighs and butt from his ride.
“Give me a hand with the tent,” she said.
It wasn’t like any tent he had ever seen. The centerpost was nothing more than a little rod that seemed to be made of white wax, but at the touch of a hand it tripled in height and an elaborate strutwork sprang out from it in five directions to provide support for the tent fabric. A Spook tent, he supposed. The tent pegs were made of the same waxy material, and all you had to do was position them where you wanted them around the perimeter of the tent and they burrowed into the ground on their own. Faint pinging sounds came from them as they dug themselves in.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Security check. The pegs are setting up a defensive zone for a hundred yards around us. Don’t try to go through it in the night.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Demeris said.
The tent was just about big enough for two. He wondered whether she was going to invite him to sleep inside it.
Together they gathered mesquite brush and built a fire, and she produced some packets of powdered vegetables and a slab of dried meat for their dinner. While they waited for things to cook Jill went to the spring, which despite the sulphurous outcroppings gave fresh, pure water, and crouched by it, stripping to the waist to wash herself. Seeing her like that was unsettling. He flicked a quick glance at her as she bathed, but she didn’t seem to care, or even to notice. That was unsettling too. Was she being deliberately provocative? Or did she just not give a damn?
He washed himself also, splashing handfuls of the cold water into his face and over his sweaty shoulders. “Dinner’s ready,” she said a few minutes later.
Darkness descended swiftly. The sky went from deep blue to utter black in minutes. In the clear desert air the stars began quickly to emerge, sharp and bright and unflickering. He looked up at them, trying to guess which of them might be the home star of the Spooks. They had never troubled to reveal that. They had never revealed very much of anything about themselves.