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enabled some of the canes to climb to forty meters or more despite their
nar-row diameters and apparent fragility. Feeling a little shaky, Evan snapped
off a three‑meter length and tucked it under one arm. As a weapon it was
next to useless, but it would make a serviceable probe.
He used it on the next waterhole, but only after some-thing bright purple and
beige rolled out of the undergrowth on four ball bearings to sip at the
water's edge. It extended a coiled yellow snout, inhaled its fill, and rolled
noise-lessly off into the forest. Evan assumed its place by the pool, jabbed
repeatedly at the water with his newly acquired staff, and prepared to jump or
run as circumstances dictated. He was required to do neither. Nothing grabbed
the pole; nothing dissolved it. There was nothing in the pool but water. Then
and only then did he bend to drink.
The bail‑bearing drinker had been an organosilicate, a protein lifeform
shielded by a silicate shell. He found himself wondering how it would taste if
cooked over a slow fire. No, not yet. He hadn't been out of the MHW that long.
He made a meal of concentrates, added appro-priate vitamins, and continued on.
His‑close escape at the hands of the pool‑dweller was forgotten
when he noticed a perceptible strengthening of his beacon's light. He was
still on course, then, and would not have to waste valuable time by returning
to the suit and seeking a different direction. As the long evening set in, the
brilliance of his surroundings was minimized. When he was able to see without
his crude sunshades, he stowed them carefully in his pack, then reviewed his
limited stock of food.
He had enough to get him back to the station, but no guarantee that he would
find untouched stores of food once he returned. He'd seen how easily the local
lifeforms could break into and devour the materials used to manufacture
electronic components, witnessed their taste for the basic elements that
comprised the human body. He might return in high spirits only to find an
empty larder.
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If he was going to have to dine on the wildlife, now was as good a time to try
it as any, while he still had some regular food to tide him over the
inevitable stomach upsets. He would have to hunt carefully among the
organosili-cates for something palatable.
Might as well take a stab at hunting and gathering now, during the one time of
day when he could see without his encumbering plastic eyewrap. He would
improvise. Man-kind had progressed somewhat beyond the skills neces-sary for
hunting and gathering, and the citizens of Samstead had progressed rather
farther than most. Which was another way of saying Evan was acutely aware of
his ignorance.
Still another in the chain of ponds lay ahead, sheltered beneath a grove of
what looked like glass poles topped by abandoned birds' nests. The nests were
actually clumps of delicate fibers that strained to catch the rays of the
slowly setting sun. Evan could see them moving, following the shrinking light,
drinking in the photons. In the center of each pole was a greenish vein as
thick as his leg. It was impossible to tell where silicate life ended and
carbon-based began.
Piles of shattered trunks and broken fibers provided good cover, but try as he
might, he couldn't locate any-thing small and edible. Everything was encased
in a sil-icate shell or was composed entirely of inedible silicate materials.
Disgusted, he gave up before nightfall and lay down to watch the fibers atop
the pole‑trees slump against their trunks. Once more the decreasing
light brought forth a multitude of night sounds prodigious in their
inventive-ness.
Constrained screams, shrill whistles, buzzes, and peeps were familiar to him
by now. In addition he knew that the air waves were alive with an alien
cacophony pitched well above his hearing range.
Of more concern was the awakening of nocturnal car-nivores, though so far he
hadn't been disturbed after dark. That was fortunate, since the only weapons
he possessed were a fragile silicate staff and a fragment of broken bub-ble
grass.
He strove to lie as still as possible.
Like the day, the night was comfortably warm, a real blessing considering his
meager attire. Hadn't his ances-tors made do with nothing at all? But they had
been covered with fur.
Well, he wasn't dead yet, and with each hour of con-tinued survival his
confidence increased, if not his real-istic prospects. Hadn't he survived most
of a whole day outside on an alien world without a suit? It was a talent the
citizens of Samstead had forgone long ago, resurrected by one Evan Orgell out
of necessity. He had traversed a respectable number of kilometers by the power
of his own muscles, avoided several dangerous lifeforms, and made an attempt,
albeit an unsuccessful one, to obtain local food. He had much, he was
convinced, to be proud of.
In fact, it seemed that he had been pretty much left alone by Prism's
inhabitants, an observation which led him to consider a radical possibility.
If
the staff of the research station had not tried to defend their post but
instead had abandoned it to the catastrophe which had in the end overwhelmed
it, would they too have been left alone? On a world as unpredictable and
unexplored as
Prism, was passivity better than an active defense in the face of alien
attack?
It took his mind off the night sounds as he sat there, scrunched in between
two glassy trees as the stars replaced the sun with their wholly inadequate
light.
When the rush of adrenaline through his system lessened, exhaustion began to
creep in and he became aware of how tired he really was.
He didn't know when he fell asleep, but he did not expect to awaken until
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morning. As worn out as he was, it took something spectacular to wake him in
the middle of the night.
What happened was that a star tried to get into his eye.
It was bright blue and it tickled. He twisted and jerked his head violently.
Aware that something had settled on his face, he sat up fast and brushed
sharply at the star with his right hand. It flew away as he opened his eyes.
Until then he'd slept within the womb of the MHW, the visor darkened to shut
out any external sights which might have disturbed his rest. No visor stood
between him and the night sights of Prism now. One of them had landed on his
cheek and tickled him awake.
The night was alive with dancing jewels. His first thoughts were of the
fireflies of Earth or the pinmotes of Hivehom, but it quickly became apparent
that the phe-nomenon he was observing was no kin to those familiar
luciferase‑producing lifeforms. They were something dif-ferent,
strikingly different.
They were much brighter than their purely carbon-based analogs and they
exhibited every imaginable color of the rainbow as they swarmed in the
thousands above the pond. As he stared, two more darted close to his face and
hovered there. They were bright red, crimson. A third and fourth joined them,
one green, the other an extraor-dinary lavender color, all hanging in the
night air in front of him like hummingbirds. Their tiny, delicate silicate
wings generated a gentle whirring noise instead of a harsh insec-toid buzz.
They did not blink but glowed steadily, their lights, like their colors,
intense and unvarying.
He waved at them and they retreated a few centime-ters. The swarm produced [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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