"Oh, what's wrong with them, Mr. Tupaia?" the boy gasped. Tupaia could not answer. The koboldlike figures were strangely contorted, as if frozen in a rapturous convulsion; they seemed to have been caught in the middle of some terrible tetanic spasm.
But the Boaty-Bits were nearer. "They've seen us!" David gasped. "Mr. Tupaia, we'd better get out of here!"
Tupaia didn't answer. No answer was needed. He grasped the boy's hand and towed him, in great slow bounds, back into the tunnel, past the heaped corpses, back into the great wide gallery, past the riven form of the Sheliak, back along the wider passage—
And stopped short. Far down the passage other forms were approaching, great, hideous winged beasts that bore riders on their backs. He groaned in frustration, as David made an inarticulate sound and jerked his hand from Tupaia's. "David!" the kobold cried. "Come back! We'll look for another tunnel—"
But it was too late. The boy was running down the passage toward the great flying beasts; and as he neared them the one in the lead stopped, with a flurry of wings. A woman seated behind the rider slipped off, an incredibly tall, lean woman; and David ran up to her, crying, "Mama!"
SEVENTEEN
Living with the Kooks was more tedious than frightening, but it was frightening, too. There were at least ten of the giant glassy crabs, as well as countless smaller ones, down to the size of a quarter. The crabs seldom slept. There was never a time when one of the big ones was not near Jen Babylon. He thought of them as his guards; no other term fit them, although they presumably had other functions, too, since they could not have been stationed there simply on the chance that he might arrive. But they guarded him. If Babylon wandered too near an outside door, one of them scuttled between him and it. If Babylon got in the way of something that was going on, one of them warned him off, talking to him in that curious, tape- recorded manner of speech that they possessed, or simply rose up silently before him. Which was warning enough. He was never harmed, or even touched, but the message was clear. As a linguist, he could not help observing their strange speech patterns. Puzzling at first, they became clear in a burst of comprehension. The crabs simply copied words spoken to them! Somewhere, inside their arthropod bodies there was an information-processor not unlike a Pmal. The more language they heard, the more they could repeat and use. The larger ones spoke in almost normal vocabularies, though stiltedly; the smallest ones seemed to have to learn as they went along.
There were at least half a dozen human Kooks—if you could call them human! If they would stay still long enough to be counted! They were not kept prisoner in the apartment, like Babylon. They came and went freely on mysterious errands, and on some not so mysterious. Some of them left bearing little packets of what looked like diamond dust—he did not at first see where it came from— and returned hours later, if they returned, usually with shopping bags full of food, sometimes with what looked like simple trash scavenged at random. The scrap went into the bathtubs of the joined apartments—bits of iron, chunks of rock, shards of broken glass, odds and ends of unidentifiable debris. (So much for bathing! Which accounted, partly at least, for the way the human Kooks smelled.) The food became the diet for the humans in the apartments— weird mixtures of things like lettuce and honey, eels and carrots stewed together; the tastes were indescribable and sometimes awful, but the Kooks did not seem to care, and Babylon's complaints were laughed at. Or, more often, ignored. At odd intervals throughout the day an old- fashioned electric alarm clock would go off and the Kooks would stop whatever they were doing to prostrate themselves, chanting, before the larger crabs—which seemed, if anything, amused, if you could be sure of detecting amusement in a glass crustacean.
"Why can't I leave?" Babylon demanded, and Sheryl placed her hand over his.
"You aren't one of us," she said with tender reproach.
"I don't want to be one of you! I just want to go back to my life."
"We must all do what Cuckoo gives us to do," she told him seriously. "Let your soul open to the Savior and Destroyer, Jen, hon! You will find such peace!"
He sighed. He had not been able to get a rational word out of her. "What I really want," he said bitterly, "outside of getting out of here, is a bath."
She laughed sweetly. "That's not possible just now, Jen."
"Then I want to go to sleep," he muttered.
"Of course! I, too. Come along, hon." And she led him into one of the bedrooms. There were twin beds, and each of them was occupied by two Kooks, lying on bare mattresses with an old army blanket pulled over them. There was a strange bulge in the middle of each bed. Sheryl leaned over the couple in the nearest bed and whispered softly to them. They woke instantly, smiling, and threw off the blanket. They rose from the bed, genuflected to the single crab that crouched on the dresser, and left the room. "Time for bed," Sheryl whispered tenderly. "Come on, Jen, hon!"
For a startled moment Babylon felt a quick priapic shock; but he had mistaken her meaning. This was no invitation to the sort of bedding they had shared so often before. Even if she had wanted that—with the two other Kooks snorting gently in their sleep in the next bed and the glassy crab clattering softly as it stirred on the chest—there was an obstacle. The lump in the center of the bed revealed itself as a prim reminder of old New England. A bundling board! It was an old ironing board, really, with the legs snapped off; but as Sheryl got in on one side she propped it between them as she held the blanket for Babylon to climb in on the other.
"Good God," said Babylon, "is that thing necessary?"
"It's better to have it, hon," she whispered soothingly. "Hush, though! Please don't wake the others."
"Better how?" he demanded, but obediently lowering his voice as he slipped under the blanket.
She closed her eyes and spoke dreamily. "It is a symbol, hon. Sex is over. Reproduction is over. We are fulfilling our vow to Cuckoo the Savior and Destroyer."
"And what's the vow, exactly?"
She said with pride, "We are voluntarily becoming extinct! When Cuckoo comes, the worlds awaiting him will be nice and clean—and empty! And, oh, what bliss for our Galaxy to serve him in such a way!"
When Jen awoke it was daybreak, and Sheryl was gone. Her place in the bed was taken by a short, dark man with a beard, snoring away. Babylon lay there, trying to reconcile the queer turn his life had taken with the almost as queer dreams that had disturbed his night—sexual dreams, with the smell of Sheryl in his nostrils; imprisonment dreams, perhaps sparked by his captivity, perhaps by the bundling board that kept him from his lover—or former lover, strange dreams of vacant worlds waiting a redeemer. He lay with his eyes tight shut, contemplating the dream world. They all had sensible roots in reality—all but one. What to make of that dream, so vivid, so frightening for reasons he could not identify, of a great jewel-studded chamber with glowing walls, where something terrible was happening?
He shook his head, opened his eyes, got up, and examined what was for breakfast. It appeared to be a soup of uncleaned spinach and unshelled shrimp; he shuddered and turned away. He could not eat that, so early in the morning.
Which left him with nothing to do at all. Sheryl was not in either of the apartments at that moment. None of the other Kooks seemed disposed to conversation. He prowled the rooms, dodging crystal crustaceans and flesh-and-blood Kooks with equal repugnance, and finally settled on a window with bright morning sun coming in, where at least he could gaze on freedom.