Earthchild
Doris Piserchia

DAW BOOKS, INC.
DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, PUBLISHER 1301 Avenue of the Americas New York, N. Y. 10019
COPYRIGHT ©, 1977, BY DORIS PISERCHIA All Rights Reserved. 
Cover art by Michael Whelan.
FIRST PRINTING, MAY 1977

Ebook v1.0
Scan by DJim

CONTENTS
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XX

Chapter I
In my brief mortal existence, food had never been delivered from heaven, so when we spied the melon hanging on an odd-looking vine I sensed adversity. I was four years old, my name was Reee and I was about to be orphaned.
I believed a monster of the plains had tied the melon on the vine, by what manner I had no idea, but I wished my mama wouldn't drag her favorite and only girl child by the hair as she hurried across the thick moss toward a fruit that had no business being there.
The world stretched around us like a jungle gone mad and the big red sun tried to penetrate the tree branches and bum us raw. I stepped on a thorn bigger than my foot. Fortunately I wasn't heavy enough to make it pierce me, but I howled anyway and my mama yanked my arm. She was hungry and in a cranky mood.
Where the forest ended, the moss plains began, an ocean of beautiful green curls that seemed to roll on forever. A few yards beyond the last row of trees, on the mere fringes of the plains, grew a single tree. The melon hung from one of its branches on a gray vine.
It would have been a tasty meal, that melon. Mama grabbed it, yanked on it and immediately a net fell from a tree limb directly above her and scooped her up like a handful of dirt. It missed me because as soon as she released my hair to grasp the melon I fell through a hole in the moss. Before it closed over my head I saw the net being taken into the sky. Somebody had stolen my mama and I was probably going to get killed sometime during the next few minutes. At the age of four I wasn't much at math and believed it would take me only a little while to fall to wherever I was going, after which monsters would eat me. What I didn't know was that the distance between the ground of Earth and the moss plains and jungles where people lived was approximately half a mile.
Bellowing plenty, I tumbled through darkness, felt soft I things touch me, knew it when sharp objects raked me. I landed in a deep, soft mass that promptly sank onto me from I every direction. I couldn't see it but I knew it was green. Bellowing some more, I shoved at it with my hands and kicked it with my dirty feet. Mental impressions came to me quickly. Never having seen this cool green mass in my life, and though it was pitch-black everywhere around me, I knew what she looked like. I even knew that her name was Emeroo.
"No, no, no, not in a million years!" I yelled, aware of the thought of Emeroo. She considered devouring me, spreading the atoms of my being in a straight line on the dark ground, endowing them with light and then claiming them as part of herself.
"Why not?" she said gently and, I thought, with amusement.
"Because I'm more important than anybody!"
"I see you have a well-developed drive to survive."
"Let me go, set me free!" I howled.
"To be consumed by the creatures of the night? I think not. I shall take you to myself for a little while. That way the methane and other evils will not spoil you. You are a curiosity."
"What does that mean?"
"That I am interested in all types of phenomena." I squirmed as her soft body held me more closely. She was warm now and very green. "Do you like me?" I said. "Is it important?" "I think so."
"I may even preserve you for greater things than mere study. You have a strange and interesting effect upon me."
Emeroo created oxygen within herself and fed it to me. She found edible tidbits and transferred them to my mouth. She walked in such a way that my position inside her wasn't disturbed. I didn't exactly sleep, but neither did I remain fully awake. There was nowhere else for me to go. I was at the bottom of the world where humanity hadn't lived for thousands of years. There were darkness, deadly gases, bottomless swamps and bug-eyed monsters that hated light and silently slid through the marshes and ate everything that moved. Without Emeroo I would have lasted only a few minutes.
She was my teacher, parent, provider and my companion. She gave me light in little sparkling bits that danced and hovered in my mind. Through a window in her body—a transparent thinness which she created—I occasionally viewed the bottom of the world and was instructed as to the origin and nature of the things I saw. I learned that it wasn't all darkness there. Emeroo herself was a brilliant and glittering green. Other things gave off light, some yellow, or blue, or white or red.
In time I stopped grieving for my mama. She had been taken into the sky and I would never see her again. She would cry over my memory as I cried over hers. If she were still alive, she probably thought I was dead.
Emeroo was extremely intelligent and though she had been born in and lived at the bottom of the world, she possessed enormous knowledge of people, scarabs, scorpions, flatties and all the other monsters living in my part of the planet. The fact that she had access to a great deal of recorded information concerning Earth's history and inhabitants remained unknown to me until later. She was totally versed about her own environment and during the next few years, four to be exact, she taught me something of what she knew.
Reality went on without me while I lay within the body of the gleaming green alien, warm and protected and tutored. For all those four years I shared the mind and personality of Emeroo and discovered that she, like I, was an infant. I was four, she was four million. I was human, she was elemental. There were times when we merged until not even we could differentiate between ourselves.
The incubator of her body was more comfortable than the cave of thistles in which I had been born. Nothing could match the feel of my mama's arms, but Emeroo did what she could to make me feel content. It took her but a little while to know everything in my mind, and she was amused at my thoughts of the sun. Did I really find it that bright? Was the sky truly such an empty hole, and full of light? How could the sun be such a large red splotch? It was crimson like the apples growing in the sod mounds? Red like the blood dripping from the fangs of a flattie?
The concept of time was unknown to me while I dwelt in Emeroo. She was a world in which I ate, slept, thought, lived I and grew. The darkness and dangers in the bottomlands I couldn't affect me because Emeroo had been born there, and I there she ruled. Nothing could come into physical contact I with her but what it experienced excruciating pain. I alone was invulnerable to her power, and that was because she willed it. We were together, we were often as one, never apart, never completely separated. We were Emeroo and Reee forever.       
One day she ejected me. Just like that. Pfft. I was out.
"I allowed you to grow normally during the last few years," she said, speaking so that the words could be heard only in my mind. "I could have arranged it so that you remained dormant, but I decided this was the better way."
"I don't want to go," I said. "See how I stand here and shiver? The bottomlands are dark and scary, and breathing hurts my chest. I want to go home."
"Find it in the world."
"I'm only a little child. The monsters will eat me. What can an eight year old do?" "Go and find out."
How cruel she was, how hard, how very inhuman and | oddly like my mama was this green thing that stood before me in the form of a woman. "I think your natural shape is a lump, like a slab, of mud or a rotten fruit," I said, attempting to inflict petty damage.
Immediately the beautiful figure of Emeroo deflated and became shapeless. "Do you like this better? What I look like makes no difference to me."
"You surely don't expect me to live down here by myself, so how do I get to the top layer of the world without being eaten?"
"I have prepared a tunnel for you."
It was long and narrow and glistened like pale green quartz. Gradually sloping upward, it exited upon a moss plain. Having traversed the tunnel, I reluctantly stood on I short curls of familiar green ground and wondered how long I would last. The sun hurt my eyes. It hunched at the sky's edge like a whooping red mouth and seemed to beckon me as it prepared to dip behind the world. I began remembering things. After the sun went away, it would be dark and the giant bugs would come out of their lairs to hunt for food.
I let out a long, loud shriek of grief and fear. Life wasn't at all like what I felt I deserved. My cry attracted a flattie in fee sky. It headed straight for me and I had to run as fast as I could to reach a patch of trees. Disgruntled because its size prevented it from coming into the woods after me, the beast destroyed the tops of some trees before flying away.
By the time I found enough courage to emerge onto the plain again, the sun was gone and darkness was making a swift passage from its hiding place. I didn't want them to do it, but my feet moved toward the tunnel leading down to Emeroo. I stood beside the entrance and listened to the creatures of the night. Wrapping my arms across my chest, I shivered and then snarled when I realized tears were sneaking from my eyes.
"I don't need you!" I said angrily.
"Then why are you here?"
Startled and ashamed, I saw that I was indeed there. I wasn't on the moss plain anymore. The bottomlands stretched around me in all their ugliness. At a fast trot I had left the upper layer of the world and returned to the only safety I knew. Something else surprised me. Emeroo had built a cavern of pale green crystal, and now she stood in its opening and regarded me with a wry little smile.
"I went up like you told me," I said. "I know a part of you went with me, inside me, so you could look at everything, too. I didn't see any people. I don't think there are any left. They've all been taken away like my mama. It's dark up there, and scary, and ... I don't know the word."
"You're too young. Come back to me for a little while. One day I'll put you out again. There's an enemy in the world and you can help resist her while I decide what is to be done with you."
I didn't care what she said as long as she stepped aside and let me into the cave. No matter how firmly she insisted otherwise, I had no home anywhere but with her, and I wasn't likely to find one.
Instead of living inside her body, this time I dwelt in a niche in the cave wall, not that there was any essential difference since the cavern and everything in it was made of her substance. It was cold when I first fitted myself into the niche, but then a familiar warmth crept over me and I gave myself over to comfort, security and a weird kind of existence. With my thumb in my mouth.
I lay on green moss and dreamed. The red sun was majestic and warmed my back with its ferocious rays. The sky was dark blue while the air around me was thick, almost liquid. Occasionally waterdrops from a faraway rainstorm sailed through space and pelted me. I shuddered as they touched my hot skin. I was fourteen and strong, tanned and green of eye, and I was the only human on Earth.
Not quite. The Martian was up there in her little white metal contraption, and since the sky was part of Earth, I wasn't alone. Later I learned that the white contraption was a flying machine called a pob. I learned a lot of things later. For instance, the Martian wasn't a she. He wanted to capture me to find out how I managed to stay alive when everything I about my environment was hostile. It was also his job to carry humanity from Earth to safety.
I lay on green moss and watched through slitted eyes as the pob hovered almost directly over me. Though I couldn't! see her clearly, I had a pretty good idea that the pilot was a person like me, and I wondered what she would do when the flattie arrived. It was a mile away and winging fast under the sun, its big eyes round and red and alert, its claws tucked under its belly and its body laid out in space like a huge, dirty plate. Its webbed and mighty carcass measured forty feet across.
The Martian had courage but I thought she was also stupid. Maybe she intended to hang from the end of the rope ladder dangling under her machine, grab hold of me and haul me up inside. Actually she was on the ladder taking photographs of me. My curiosity was eased by the arrival of the flattie which, with its customary whistle, flew high above the pob, descended like an open umbrella and spread itself over the vehicle. There was a sound of crunching metal, a human cry, and the Martian plummeted to the moss where I had been lying only moments before. I wasn't there anymore because I had known what her weight would do to the insubstantial surface of the world's top layer.
Two hours later I lay on another patch of moss, devouring an apple and enjoying the sun, when I heard scratching sounds several yards away. I sat up in surprise and watched as a hand appeared out of the ground. Crawling forward, I squatted and began parting the moss. The hand seemed to be frantic as it probed space. I touched it with a finger. It tried to grab me and I finally allowed it to close upon my wrist The Martian didn't want to die, but more than that, she didn't want to do it alone.
With my free hand I continued to part the tough moss and at last there was room enough for her arm to come through. I would have continued to ease her up gradually but the ground began to shake. Evidently she had chosen to climb a hollow reed from the bottomlands and now it was getting ready to buckle. It might take other hidden plant life with it, and I wanted to be gone from there before the foundation under me suddenly vanished. Standing, I gave the arm a strong yank and the Martian scrambled up through tangled vines and curly moss. Immediately I let go of him, turned and walked away toward the forest. Obviously he wasn't a woman at all. His climb up the reed had ripped off his clothes and I saw he was made like the blue boys the enemy manufactured in the sod mounds a quarter-mile below.
He followed me for a while but was too exhausted to keep up and fell short of the trees. I helped him to a sleeping branch, an arm of a tree that grew in a hollowed-out fashion, bid him in the cavity, squeezed some juice from a sap melon into his mouth and waited for him to regain his strength.  While he rested, I looked him over. I had vague memories of how my father had looked, and the Martian bore a strong resemblance to him.
He talked but I couldn't understand a word because he said everything aloud, with his voice, and I had forgotten my native language. Sometime during the morning he began carving pictures on the tree limb with his fingernail. It didn't lake me long to understand that he wanted me to lead him to the rolling white meadows. The only reason I agreed to do it was because the enemy had grown another blue boy who had to be destroyed and the meadows were just beyond the place where he grew.
My world teemed with life, most of it deadly to people. The Martian must have reasoned that since I managed to survive, it must be because I knew the world. In that he Was correct. Many Earthly secrets were mine, taught to me by a genius. If the enemy hadn't already known about human males, I would have hidden this one in the thistle mazes and never let him come out again. Indigo had a way of capitalizing on each and every new phenomena, and so it was to my benefit when I kept new experiences away from her. However, she already knew of the existence of men, so if she saw this Martian it wouldn't be particularly significant. Of course I had to be careful that merely seeing him was all she managed to accomplish. It wouldn't do for her to capture and consume him because then she would know everything about him, including his thoughts and memories.
Except in a few places, the half-mile-high growth on the world's surface was clean-cut and not clearly discernible as anything other than an actual surface. There was no sea level apparent anywhere. Underneath the rolling white meadows lay an ocean that hadn't been out in the open for millennia. It was covered with plant growths a thousand feet high. Often I walked on the white meadows and watched the ground sway all around me, felt the vibrations beneath my feet, sensed the movement of a great mass far below me. I sometimes teased the fat vembers that played there. They ate their way up from the ocean, creating large tunnels through which water vapor erupted. Their slippery white bodies blended into the landscape. Their claws were powerful enough for them to accomplish the long climb through the tunnels from water to open air. They spent their time basking in the sun until dusk at which time they raced for the tunnel openings and dived back into the sea.
The Martian and I walked across the moss plain and while I kept watch for flatties he gathered leaves and made himself an apron. He offered to make me one but I wasn't interested. Occasionally he held my by the arms, looked into my eyes and spoke earnestly, but I had no idea what he said.
Two miles from where he had fallen from his pob, we came to a great crack in the moss. I stepped onto a branch of a giant tree growing out of it and motioned for my companion to keep his gaze straight ahead and not look down. He didn't take my advice but glanced between the tree branches and discovered blue sky, clouds and empty space. Shoving him back onto the plain, I sat down and waited until he regained his ambition, and then I again stepped onto the tree branch and motioned for him to follow.
Usually I traveled in trees by simply dropping from one limb to another. The Martian climbed down inch by trembling inch, and it took him hours. After we reached the sod mounds he took me by the arms, gazed into my eyes and said something. I shrugged and shook my head. He was weary and perspiring and probably felt more than a little despairing. I felt sorry for him. I couldn't look after him twenty-four hours a day, which meant he wouldn't survive unless he found assistance from the tall gray machine parked on the rolling white meadows.
He patted my arm, smiled and began walking toward a large mound of what had once been thriving ivy but was now brown, porous dirt. Leaving him temporarily, I started hunting among the mounds to my left. In a few minutes I found the blue boy, fully grown and almost ripe. The vine attached to his belly was fat and ready to drop off. He was blue all over, about my height, and he looked real as he stood staring straight at me. The expression on his pretty face never changed. He even had blue teeth. I could see them through the slight gape of his mouth.
It took me a short while to find a hot bed in the rock mountain behind the mounds and then I scooped some glowing coals onto a thick leaf. The blue boy ripened completely while I was gone, the vine released him and he walked from his place of concealment. I arrived to find the Martian trying to talk to him.
Gathering some kindling from the ground beneath the tree, I spread it at the boy's feet, held him fast by the arm and made a fire with the coals. The Martian objected and tried to stop me. Shoving him out of the way, I lit the wood and stood by as the blue boy roasted and finally burst open like a pod.
The Martian was gone when I looked around. Wondering if he thought I had murdered a living person, I went after him to bring him back and make him look at the corpse. The blue boy was only a plant fabricated by Indigo. He wasn't a real human being. The curling husks on the ground, which were all that was left of him, wouldn't have deceived anyone.
I didn't think the Martian would be foolish enough to run out onto the meadows without first conducting a safety check. He must have been so outraged at me that he forgot to be cautious. Instead of tiptoeing onto the white ground, he ran and made noises that alerted the vembers. Maybe he didn't know enough about them. Their hearing was so keen that they could swim in the underground ocean, where it must have been extremely noisy, and still locate the openings of the tunnels leading topside. If a person wanted to walk unmolested among the vembers, she had to do it softly.
Stranded astronauts used the signal station to alert master ships which then dispatched pobs to rescue them. Beside radio equipment, the station also had a weapon mounted on it and after swiftly tiptoeing across the damp white ground, I stopped in surprise because the Martian was in position and aiming the long tube right at me.
His tone was bitter as he spoke. No doubt he was thinking he might as well go ahead and execute me since I wasn't worth saving. What I wanted was for him to get down off the machine and start tiptoeing. Frantically I motioned for him to come to me, but he only glared at me and started yelling at the top of his lungs.
The noise immediately brought a vember to the foot of the machine. By that time, I was already busily tiptoeing backward. There was nothing I could do to save him now. The station was about twenty feet high, but that didn't stop the vember, a female with a tremendous physique. Eight feet long and weighing five hundred pounds, her bones were long and flexible. Her four legs were short but her snout was long and full of teeth. She leaped all the way to the top of the rectangular structure where the Martian sat, sank her teeth into his back, dragged him from his seat and hurled him to the ground. Her mate grabbed the body, dragged it to a nearby tunnel opening and took it into the sea.
Dozens of vembers came from all directions. Sliding about on their bellies with their heads cocked, they listened for some sign that another prey was near. Their big dark eyes seemed to look straight through me, but I knew they were blind. Very carefully I moved among them, slowly and cautiously, almost forgetting to breathe. I felt badly about the Martian, but not badly enough to give away my position.
His signal must have gotten through because a pob burst into our part of the sky. The pilot came too low and the vembers heard the soft humming of the engine. They began to leap into the air, some of them rising thirty or forty feet. As they fell toward the ground, they inhaled until their bellies and chests were full and soft. They bounced when they landed, up and down, into the air and back they went, the shock harmlessly absorbed and dispersed.
The pilot lost control of her craft for a moment, probably terrified out of her wits, and I thought she was going to crash, but she straightened, rose well beyond reach of the leaping vembers and began cruising in circles. By then I was out of sight and hidden among the sod mounds.
Eventually the pilot would realize that whoever had signalled wasn't going to appear. If she saw me she would probably try to take me with a net. I had no intention of leaving Earth. Her job might be to transfer humans to Mars so that Indigo couldn't kill them, but mine was to see that no astronaut mistook one of the blue boys for a human and carried Indigo to the colony in the sky. There was another reason why I wouldn't leave my world. I liked it.

Chapter II
Belios looked like a carrion eater, which she was, but she was also antiseptic in her habits and didn't stink. Not the most vicious beast under the sun, she nevertheless couldn't exactly be described as a milk sucker. The fastest thing in the sky, she made a flattie look as if it moved in slow motion. I kept a supply of scarab pieces handy whenever I called her to me.
Today I evaded her swishing tail by stepping behind the body of a fat tree. Her gray leathery appendage smashed into my protection and made it shudder. Fruit fell, hit Belios on the head, made her blink her fierce orange eyes. I laughed, and as her tail went away from me, I hopped onto her left claw and then scrambled onto her back before she could lift it and hurl me from the escarpment Immediately she took wing, trying to unseat me, but I locked my legs around her] neck, grabbed two handfuls of her hide and hung on. She flew upside down, screaming like a fiend, and left my stomach on the cliffs as she dropped through a thousand feet of emptiness.
She always answered my calls to her, yet she continually tried to do away with me. I had found her newly-hatched, orphaned and being stalked by a scorpion. I took her to the Scar with me, kept her there, fed her and endured her foul humor until she was strong enough to fly. I thought she must have regarded me with some affection but her nature made her more an enemy than a friend.
Today we were on the hunt for a blue boy. Indigo usually grew them far away from her heart but I had been informed by mind link with Emeroo that a boy was even then sprouting close to the main mass.
There was no use of my trying to make Belios turn over so I could see where we were going. She dropped straight down the escarpment, flattened out and zoomed across the rolling white meadows at such a low altitude that the vembers began to take note of us.
Somewhere along the way we picked up two pursuers, a flattie and a shiny silver pob. I saw both of them because while I was hanging upside down I constantly looked around to try and orient myself. They were coming from opposite directions, and the evil klufe I was riding had nothing but mischief in her small brain. She ceased swooping close to the meadows, ascended suddenly on a straight course and continued to climb. I squeezed the hunks of her flesh in my fists, shouted as loudly as I could, even kicked her neck with my heels. The only way a flattie could kill a klufe was to descend upon it and my uncivilized companion would in no way allow the enemy to get close to her. Her intent was to abruptly dive out of the picture, leaving the flattie and the pob to discover one another. Though the machine could outmaneuver the animal, I knew the flattie would react faster once it and the pilot spotted one another.
With me screeching my head off as I clung to her, Belios did as I predicted, suddenly put on speed and arched over and away. Too many things began to happen all at once, so I couldn't keep track of them. What I knew for certain was that the air was full of blazing blue klufes and flatties.
I had wrongly assumed that Indigo was too far away to manufacture creatures and send them after me. Obviously she had changed her position. At any rate, I and my klufe plus the genuine flattie and the pob carrying a human were under attack. Belios pierced a fat blue belly with her beak and it burst and showered those below with sticky pulp. A blue flattie received most of the pulp on one side of its webbed body. The weight was too much for it. Its side tipped ever so slightly, air pressure changed, equilibrium was lost and the flattie fell shrieking to earth.
We souled entities hadn't much more agility than the phonies made by Indigo. They were strong and fast and we were outnumbered. My klufe naturally wanted to carry the fight higher and higher so that no flattie could get above her. In the meantime I was kicking her neck purple as I tried to get her to veer off and go lower. She screeched at me in outrage, angrily piercing the bulbous abdomen of a blue flattie preparing to wrap her in a death hug.
The pilot of the pob knew how to evade flatties. The machine was speedy and could fly rings around the big flat creatures. Getting above one, the pilot sent the pob flashing against a section of blue webbing. As soon as the flattie lost its balance, it fell and crashed onto the meadows. The blue klufes had an advantage over the machine; there were too many for the pilot to keep track of them. One struck a metal side with its beak, dented it and knocked it off course. Another lashed the craft with its tail.
In the meantime, I finally got through to Belios and she gave off stabbing enemies and dropped in the sky, hesitating while I kicked her again. All the blue beasts dropped in pursuit of us. The genuine flattie, wounded and sore, promptly ascended above us, took a moment to survey the situation and then flapped away to safety. Instead of taking the same course, the pilot of the pob followed the war to a lower altitude.
Sometime during the next few minutes I lost sight of the machine. My klufe kept her gaze below us on the vembers while I guarded our rear, and whenever an enemy from that quarter came too close I squeezed with my knees, causing Belios to dip and shift to another position. At the same time, the vembers were doing their thing. Thirty and forty feet they leaped into the air, hauling down screaming blue things, dragging them to the tunnels and carrying them into the sea.
Indigo's creations weren't especially intelligent. Instead of dividing forces and having one portion call out the position of vembers while the other portion attacked me, they came without caution and were picked off one by one, hauled away and drowned. Toward the last, there were so many vembers leaping up at us that Belios and I barely escaped. As for the pob, it was nowhere to be seen and I could only assume it had gone the way of our enemies.
My klufe and I rested for a while before continuing our search. We flew high and low, and by and by we spotted two blue boys walking on the meadows. Vembers were all around them but they moved in safety because they did it so quietly. Signalling Belios to eject me, I hung from her neck, waited until she was low enough and then I let go and dropped. Immediately half a dozen vembers attacked, but I was already gone from my landing place.
I ran up behind a blue boy, shrieked and sped away on tiptoe. Three vembers took hold of him, parted him into sections and took him away. When I tried to do the same thing with the remaining boy, he put on great speed, racing across the meadows with me in pursuit. Even in the sod mounds I had a tough time catching up with him.
He was very pale blue and not at all like the boys to which I was accustomed. He smiled often and was intelligent, and be even tried to communicate with me by sign language. I was having none of it and busily hunted around for the things with which to burn him up. He didn't approve of my plan, kept shaking his head and gesturing with his hands and moving away so that I couldn't hold him fast and let the flames take him. Then he screamed at me in mind link so shrilly I almost fell over backward.
"You can't murder me! It's immoral!"
Astounded, I managed to keep my thoughts on an even keel. "Don't try and fool me. I know you're just a piece of Indigo,"
His pretty blue face puckered and I thought I saw a tear in the corner of one eye. "My name is Bakta. I don't understand anything that's happening. What's going on? Why are you trying to hurt me?"
"Stop pretending you're human."
"Pretending?" he said. "I am human. Isn't it obvious?"
"Then why don't you talk with your mouth like humans do?"
His lips formed a round O and his eyes grew wide as if he knew he had been caught in a serious error; but he spoke coolly. "You're not talking with your mouth."
"Don't waste your time trying to outthink me. Just tell me how you prefer to expire—roasted, toasted or fried?"
His mouth went thin. "I don't think you're going to hurt me at all. If you touch me again, I'll bash you."
"Oh, ho, ho!" I said, but the truth was, my conscience bothered me. I knew without a doubt that he was an artificial creation of Indigo's, and I knew he had no heart and that he wasn't a soul or anything. Still, he seemed so real. "You're a sad bundle of flab and couldn't bash anybody," I said. "Quit crying. I've decided not to kill you. How would you like to join me for a ride on my klufe? It's a guaranteed thrill."
"I don't know. I'm not exactly keen. It sounds unpleasant, Maybe—"
"You claim to be human. Riding klufes is humans' favorite pastime."
"Don't you think I know that?" he said, a bit hurriedly.
Giving a piercing whistle, I paused while something high in the sky gave an answering shriek. Bakta looked up with a fearful expression. Again I whistled and the sun was blanked out as a mean and uncivilized specimen overhead spread her wings.
Instead of mounting Belios on the move as I usually did, I made her park on her four claws and sit still while I climbed aboard. "Hurry up," I said to a very reluctant blue boy who finally seated himself behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. "Hang on, human," I said quietly, and prepared to kick Belios. She was already rolling on her wings like down in a sudden draft, like cotton on an upwind, like an unregenerate fiend who intended to unseat her riders. She didn't succeed but only complained when I aimed her toward the tunnel of the dreeps.
The tunnel entrance was a black hole in a wall of green beyond the sod mounds. Belios approached it, climbed high and suddenly folded her wings in a steep dive. As soon as she entered the hole, all light was extinguished. Her passage was swift and silent and would terminate when she arrived at a white pinpoint far ahead.
The home of the dreeps was made of vines almost as hard and unyielding as metal. Crisscrossing in tight webs to form the tunnel, the vines were impervious to rot, teeth or bludgeoning. We weren't ten feet into the corridor before things began dropping on us. Soft little objects skidded down my face, belly, legs, landed in my hair, collected in my lap by the thousands. I felt their miniature feet on my skin, felt their tongues taste and reject me, knew it when they gathered on Belios, crawled under her wings, tasted and spat her out. Behind me, Bakta screamed once and then was quiet.
The klufe under me sailed down the hall of blackness while little plant vampires fell on us. It was cold and silent in the dark and not even the fast flight of Belios created a breeze. At last the pinpoint of white ahead of us became a yawning cave of light that engulfed us, and we flew over a stretch of moss plains.
Belios landed and I slid off her. Brushing small green things out of my hair, I said, "Look at him for me, will you?"
Giving me a look of love-hatred, the klufe proceeded to clean herself with her murderous looking beak. "I can't look at him," I said, more to myself than to her. "I know he was only a plant, and I know the dreeps ate him, but I don't want—"
Belios suddenly raised one wing. Something light and dry fell from her back with a crackling sound. I turned to see what was left of Bakta who had sworn he was human. The dreeps had feasted on him and all that remained was a thin, empty sack that slowly broke apart and drifted away on the wind.
"Let's get out of here," I said, with a swift kick for my klufe. She squawked and took to the air like a missile. Settling myself in the depression behind her head, I yelled, "You have no natural sentiments! What do you care that he was just a pokeful of plant juice?"
Belios responded by making straight for the Scar. She was tired of my company and wanted to get rid of me. Depositing me above my house, she sped away.
My house was made of soft yellow thistle silk and nestled under a roof of red stone. The Scar was a finger of rock sticking two hundred feet out of a moss plain. Ten feet below the pinnacle was a niche inside of which I had built a shack. It was the only place I could find to live in safety from crawling and jumping things. The creatures of the air could do me no harm because the niche wasn't big enough to accommodate their bodies.
That night it rained and the wind drove straight at my front door. I got out of bed and tugged on a vine hanging from the ceiling. Outside, thick layers of silk sheaves turned so that their strands were vertical. I heard the roar as rain poured off them and hit the stone below. Earlier, the sheaves had pointed west so that the rays of the setting sun would glance off and not hit my shack full force.
The wind raged and I felt the Scar sway. Swearing humbly, I went back to my tick, pulled up the blanket of thistle silk to my chin and lay there considering what would happen to me if the Scar fell. All the windows were tied shut but a flash of lightning came in and lit things. Thunder split my ears and again the Scar swayed. The thought came to me, as it had nearly every night for the past six years, that I could lie there and worry or I could turn over and go to sleep. I chose to do the latter; and dreamed of the enemy.
It was a strange dream. I was fleeing down a long, narrow corridor ahead of a blue tide that threatened to catch up with me at the next bend. Turning suddenly, I stretched out my arm, pointed at Indigo with a green finger and shouted, "Stop!" Incredibly, she stopped. I began telling her how rotten she was and all of a sudden she began to sob and wail. She even heaved herself against the wall. I was so surprised I forgot to be cautious, and while I stood there staring at her with my mouth open, one of her blue boys sneaked up behind me and scratched me with a poisoned thorn. Immediately the cold of nothingness began creeping through me. "You've killed me," I said.
The blue boy laughed. "What did you think I'd do? I've been after you all my life."
My green finger came up and pointed at him. "Stand still." He wriggled, squirmed and yelled his head off, but his bounds were set and he couldn't move. Gently I touched him in the middle of his forehead with the tip of my green finger. His flesh exploded and began to burn. I turned to do the same thing to the main body of Indigo, but she was gone, flowing like a narrow blue sea away from me, moving so rapidly I couldn't catch up.
The rest of the dream consisted of my trying to place my enemy in an obvious niche in reality. I failed. Indigo was an intelligent creature that had been alive on my planet for a very long time. Her ambition was to conquer. To her, quantity and quality were nearly the same. She intended to continue growing until everything was under her dominion.

Chapter III
I didn't know if Nawhana was real or a spawn of the enemy, but she was so beautiful that I hadn't attempted to destroy her in all the months I had known her. For three weeks she had been lost in the thorn mazes and twice she attacked me. My body was already covered with slowly-healing thorn rounds, and I was in no mood for a meeting with a big, mean scarab. It had been necessary that I come to the mazes because they were one of the few places where protein-rich muk beans grew.
Cautious, watchful and alert, I was ready to jump in any direction, but it didn't matter. From behind a thicket of thorns whipped a leathery antenna that whacked me across fee shoulder and sent me plowing into a bed of needles. A second later, the scarab's glittering carcass was astraddle the bed and her mandibles were crunching fat thorns as if they were straws. In the meantime I was deep into the bed and burrowing my way toward a denser patch of misery.
Swearing earnestly, I leaned against relatively soft thorns and peered between the clusters. The tip of an antenna snaked toward me and I stabbed it with a needle. It withdrew and came at me from another direction. Nawhana was six feet long, five feet high and weighed about three hundred pounds. Many different shades of blue, her armored underside was pale, almost white, while her back was dark and glistened like liquid. Her eyes were so blue they looked black. The antennae jutting from her head were azure, the sucker in her mouth was a vivid blue.
Attractive she might be, but having been lost in the mazes for such a long time made her starved and willing to eat the last person on Earth, which happened to be me.
Nawhana touched my toe with the sharp part of a mandible, so I began making like a skinny snake. Not often did I regret going around naked, but that day I did. The thorn clusters in each straight hedge were tight and composed of needles two to twelve inches long. The big ones weren't dangerous since their points were too fat to pierce me unless I put all my weight on them, which I was careful not to do. It was the little ones that brought me agony, and by the time I made it through that particular hedge I was leaking from two dozen places.
As soon as I pulled my legs free, I scrambled up and started running. The big bug could leap over the shorter hedges and the one I abandoned was only about twenty feet high. Behind me I heard some loud clicks, as if an overgrown insect had landed on dry vines. For a couple of seconds I didn't hear anything at all behind me and quickly guessed that Nawhana was making one of her famous jumps. I rounded another high hedge and started up a fifty-foot-wide corridor. To my left was a short hedge with plenty of holes in it. Glancing over my shoulder, I gasped and headed for one of the holes while the tip of a blue mandible made a furrow in the ground behind me.
Something wet sprayed me as I squirmed through the opening. The white petals of a perfume blossom closed nearby, and the plant shrank and hid itself in the greenery. At the same time I was wondering how much longer I had to live. Insects were attracted to the juice of the perfume blossom. Nawhana must have gotten a good whiff of me because she produced some furious clicking sounds and jumped over the hedge as if it were nonexistent.
I went through the next hedge, threw myself to the ground and rolled to rub off some of the sticky pink substance. It helped, but not a great deal. Nawhana followed my smell without faltering and I knew I couldn't outrun her in the open. Regretting my decision to lead her from the mazes, I turned to go back in and saw her just topping the final hedge, two hundred yards away. My only retreat was across a moss plain to a beckoning forest. I would have preferred going to the right where the plains seemed to stretch forever with no trees to mar their emptiness. The Scar lay that way but with Nawhana on my trail I had to reach the safety of the trees.
Somewhere along the way I picked up another pursuer. Scorp was the name I had given to the giants of the moss plains. They didn't weigh much but they were nine feet of savage, venomous bug and I had never been within yards of one of them. The scorp lumbering over the moss was a glistening black color with an armored tail four feet long and a stinger half that length. The spear was sharp on both sides and tipped with a point so wicked and fine it was almost invisible. The beast buzzed as it came after me, and its stinger prowled the air as if it hungered for me.
I knew many facts about the geography and topography of ancient and contemporary Earth. Emeroo had taught them to me. I was aware that the peaceful blue ocean to the south, with its frothy surf and gentle rolling movements, couldn't be genuine because the oceans had been covered with thick crusts for millennia, so I complained with energy when the beasts behind and around me forced me to travel south. Not just Nawhana and the black scorp longed for me now. The reeking perfume splashed on me by the flower had lured two huge red scarabs and an old brown scorp that hemmed me in and prevented me from changing my course.
The peaceful blue ocean, which was really the body of Indigo, shone like glass, reflected the sun, bounced fiery balls of light through the forest and across the moss plains. They blinded me. As I ran, I whistled for Belios but not with any substantial hope since she was contrary and disloyal and hadn't the sense to care whether I lived or died. Nawhana was my most dedicated pursuer, literally ate my dust while she rubbed her antennae and told me with soft clicks and screeches what she intended to do with me. Unable to speak a syllable of scarab talk, I still understood the meaning of her sounds.
After entering the first line of trees, I gave up any idea of Belios coming to my rescue. Her great wing span prevented her from flying in forests. I moved more slowly, as did the enemies behind me. My concern was more with those ahead of me. As yet I couldn't see them, but I knew they would come.
Indigo looked like a body of water most of the time. Sometimes she took the shape of a mountain but her progress across the planet was faster when she spread out. Only a small part of her was visible from the moss plains beyond the forest, where I had no intention of going. The actual shape of Indigo at the moment was that of a sickle moon or a cresting wave. Her unseen parts extended downward half a mile to Earth's real surface where she worried at the plant life growing out of the ground. The plants were old, huge and powerful and always resisted, which was one of the reasons for Indigo's bad humor. She wanted immediate capitulation at all times. Her desire was to go everywhere, which meant that all obstacles must be removed. She would lie against a tree for a while, hugging and kissing it, and by and by that section of the tree dissolved and became part of her. Then she moved on to the next plant. In the meantime, the upper section of the first one was creating stress upon everything in its surrounding area. In order to survive, a tree had to keep pace with its growing neighbors. It had to be a couple of thousand feet high and many yards in diameter. Unless its upper branches were entwined with other giants, it either, sagged straight downward when its bottom was eaten away or it gradually fell over and took a healthy quantity of moss plains or forest with it. Continual earthquakes rocked this part of the world, and no one with any brains went near it.
So much for the nature of a blue monster that intended to consume reality, I had a pack of reality's children on my heels and no escape route was planned or visible. The forces against me had increased until I couldn't count them with a quick glance, and I hadn't time for a longer look. The plains behind me crawled with danger while the forest around me crackled with the sounds of behemoths biting, chewing and beating their way through the brush. There was only one way for me to go; toward the plain where Indigo dwelt.
Her first emissary came slithering down a tree trunk and 1 waited until it was almost close enough to grab me before turning to run. I made a mistake in assuming the thing was like an ordinary snake. It coiled its head and foresection around a small limb and unleashed the rest of itself like a whip. Blue rope zoomed through the air, went over my head as I dropped and lashed at the tail of a brown scorp. The tail was severed by the blow and the bug watched its blood pump out onto the ground. The whip cracked again as a chunk of moss beside me was torn away. I rolled and sat up to face a red scarab. It clicked its pincers above my head and then lowered them to decapitate me but instead pierced a blue rope that whipped between us. I leaped aside as blue pulp spurted and spilled.
Rather than her usual variety of uglies, Indigo sent only blue whips to the battle that day. They moved much more agilely than the big lumbering scarabs and scorps. I saw Nawhana dissect a whip into four pieces that flopped and wriggled away toward the plains where Indigo watched us and waited. Another whip cut off several inches of Nawhana's right antenna. She grabbed the enemy with a claw and gored it. The sharp spike of her mandible ripped a furrow in the blue creature and it suddenly stopped moving and lay inertly on the ground.
Whips began dropping from every tree, causing the scorps and scarabs to retreat back the way they had come. As soon as they realized the whips weren't interested in chasing them, they retreated all the faster. I had been skulking beneath the body of the dead scorp and before I could find a better hiding place, every whip in the area was slithering along the ground in search of me.
As if on silent order, they all stopped crawling and stuck their heads into the air. I knew then that they were blind.
They were going to lie very quietly and locate me with their hearing. Indigo wanted me to know how contemptuous she was of me. She had sent inferior soldiers after me because I was an inferior foe.
That might have been true, but I had enough sense to know that the sounds made by the retreating scarabs and scorps would soon die away and then the only discernible noise in that part of the forest would be my breathing. While I still had some small cover, I inched my way toward the hole in the moss made by the first whip. Slipping into it feet first, I hung onto the stringy growths and felt around underneath with my toes. The moss and tangled vines were thin there and I had to stretch my legs to come in contact with a cluster of damp vines. Clamping my ankles around a fat one, I let go with my hands and dropped down into blackness. As soon as I was brought up short by the vine around my ankles, I grabbed it with my hands and quietly and cautiously reached out to the next nearest plant. It was a reed. Transferring to it, I went on to the next, which turned out to be a fat tree trunk. There were plenty of niches in that giant and I climbed around to the other side of it and found another cluster of vines. As rapidly as possible, I moved away from my spot of entry. If Indigo had only given her troops eyes, she might have had me.
However, something else might soon have me. Fright clamped down on me like a heavy weight. My brain became filled with it, my body sagged under it. I couldn't possibly survive down here. If the million and one creatures living on and in these dark growths didn't get me, the lethal gases drifting, seeping, oozing and climbing everywhere would.
I clung to a hollow reed and tried to make myself part of it. Memory stirred, made me shrink and groan. There—the rustling of a fifty-toed worm that would walk across me and leave fifty tiny round offspring on my skin; they would begin right away to burrow and they would eat me alive from the inside out. There—the gentle honking of a lapper that longed to lay its tongue on me and lift off a pound of flesh. Except for the dangoes, everything here was small, silent, humble and dangerous. In contrast, dangoes were large and loud but no less sinister and deadly. They swung from growth to growth, just beneath the moss plains and upper forests, their long black arms constantly stretching, their three-fingered hands grabbing foot-long grubs or other tidbits. Dangoes made holes in the moss plains and built nests with thick walls and thin floors. They slept in relative safety from the things above and below the plains and escaped through the floor when they needed to forage in their dark habitat. A dango had keen hearing and knew when something large walked on the universe above him. He was strong enough to force a hand through the moss and drag a victim down to him. By the time it arrived, it was mangled and either dead or too weak to resist.
I heard the slap, slap of a dango's hands as it swung through the upper reaches of darkness. Already sticking like glue to the reed, I stopped breathing. The dango had no eyes so it couldn't see me. If I made a sound, it would be upon me in a second, ripping me from my perch, rending my frail house of flesh, killing....
As I clung to my hollow piece of reality and listened to the terror thundering in my temples, I cried out in my mind, "Help, help!"
Almost at once the green thought came to me, "Peace; silence is safety."
My fear ebbed. The reed swayed precariously, but it didn't worry me. The noises around me ceased to be sinister but instead became merely sounds that were easy to recognize. The dango swung hand over hand past me, its blank face incurious, its black body nearly invisible in the ebony reaches.
Silently I slid down the reed, stopped short of the gas clouds hovering above the ground, transferred myself into a knothole in a tree, and there I curled against one wall and fell asleep. I dreamed nothing. Upon awakening, I climbed up the reed, crossed over the several plants to the opening in the moss ceiling, hauled myself up and out, ran through the forest and across the plains, and then I began hunting for food.
Water cups were blossoms that captured rain and held it so the sun could drink it all day. At night the cups closed around the retained fluid and opened in the morning. I stood on a sod mound, bent over and sucking my fill from a cup, when I saw something that made me lose my balance and fall off the mound. I arose to my hands and knees and stared into the face of a sleeping boy. He lay in a nest of vines beneath a large leaf. His face was streaked, as if with tears but, more important, he wasn't blue. His body was as tanned as mine; his hair was shorter than mine and not nearly as black. I guessed he would be about my size, standing up.
As I squatted there gawking at him he opened his eyes, looked startled and sat up in a hurry. "Who are you?" I said, jumping up and backing away a short distance.
He cocked his head and shrugged. After staring at me for a minute, he rubbed his stomach and smacked his lips. He started to get up, so I leaped to my feet. His face was pretty and he had an attractive body.
"I don't care how hungry you pretend to be, and I don't care if your skin isn't blue," I said. "I don't believe those eyes are human." They were like the sky, with no white showing and with no pupil in them. Two round, glittering blue eyes were his, and they surely came from Indigo.
He smiled and I caught a faint glimmer of blue in his teeth. As he extended a hand toward me, I showed him my palm. 
"Lay a finger on me and I'll make ashes out of you," I said.
He frowned and stayed his hand.
"See, you understand me just fine. Now, why don't you just come along with me? Somewhere on this planet there's a grave waiting for your pretty self."
He followed me like a pup, skipping and hopping across the plains in seemingly good spirits and with a too-strong inclination to pat me on the shoulder, back, cheek or wherever else he could reach. Once I kicked him in the shin and we both watched while his leg sank in, as if it were hollow. The flesh popped out again so fast I wondered if I had imagined it was ever other than sound and firm.
For a change, Belios came right away when I whistled for her. The boy took one look at the huge gray monster zooming down at us and ran away, shrieking and glaring back over his shoulder. He tripped and fell flat on his belly, rolled over and fought for breath.
"If you're coming with me you'd better be ready to jump on that beast's back when she lands because she won't give you a second to make up your mind," I said. "Personally I don't care if you choose to stay on the ground. You're so inhumanly ignorant you won't last beyond nightfall."
For someone who didn't speak mind link, he understood me very well. Even as I was clawing for seating space on Belios' spiny meat, he was gripping me around the middle and snuggling up to my back. He let out a scream of horror as the klufe under us tried to unseat her riders by skinning beneath a tree. I ducked with finesse and the winged traitor picked up a few gouges that caused her to match the boy's shrieks.
She flew upside down about three feet above the plains. Probably she hoped to snag my long hair on a root or briar. I made up my mind that if I went, so did she. Gripping her behind the ears, I put pressure on two extremely sensitive cavities that had a great deal to do with her sense of equilibrium. Squawking in rage, she turned end over end until she instinctively shot skyward.
"Let that be a lesson to you!" I yelled. "You're not ever killing me without doing the same thing to yourself!" The boy hung onto me, limp as thistle silk and sobbing his nonexistent heart out.
That piece of bird dung under us ascended higher and soared to the Scar in an angry huff. She banked and dipped toward it in a half-hearted dive and I let her know with a swift kick in the neck that I had no intention of debarking on such a miserable run. She repeated herself with a little more grace and enthusiasm, and as soon as she hesitated just above the flat top of the Scar I dropped from her back, dragging the boy along. Belios showed me her agitation by circling in the sky and then coming back to try and knock me away with her wingtip.
The boy followed my actions, shinnied down ten feet of rock to a ledge and jumped into the sheltered niche I called home.
"You don't live up here," he said, the thought thready in his mind, his big blue eyes stark. "I do."
"What if you fell off? It must be two hundred feet to the moss down there."
"I'd be dead and out of trouble." 
Trembling as if with cold, he avoided looking at the ledge everywhere around us and glanced at my house. "You don't live in that thing." "Why not?"
"It doesn't look fit for a person," he said. "It was the best I could find under the circumstances. Are you hungry?" "No." "Thirsty?" "No."
"Well, I am," I said, and went into my house and drank from a gourd. The water tasted old so I walked back outside, headed for the ledge and paused on a matting of vines. Pretending to scratch my ankle, I slipped a loop of vine around it. Standing on the tip of the ledge, I emptied my gourd. I hadn't even finished before the boy sneaked up behind me and gave me a hard shove.
It was an unusual way to find out who and what he was. For a few minutes I swung back and forth across the yawning mouth of perdition. Every so often I crashed against the rock wall and acquired another sore place. When at last I stopped swinging, I reached up, grabbed the vine, loosed my ankle and climbed back to my happy habitat Indigo assumed I was good and dead and, since she had no more use for the boy, she withdrew her influence, or her essence, or whatever, from him. By the time I arrived on the shelf, he was beginning to sag. His eyes died first, lost their vividness, slowly turned brown, atrophied and fell out. His head shrank and drooped. The rest of him was beginning to split open and raise a stink when I kicked him over the side.

Chapter IV
The earth was in an uproar. I lay on moss under a tree and listened to the noises. My bed of tangled vines shook. Somewhere a tree was falling and taking things with it, ripping out chunks of moss plains so I could never walk on them again, knocking down hollow reeds and weaker trees and all the other plants growing under my world. Indigo was busily murdering my environment.
The air around me was almost thick enough to wade in. The sun tried to bully its way through tree limbs to singe my fringes. Not today. I didn't feel up to getting a burn. What would it be like to breathe thin air? How would it feel to walk on solid ground and know you could walk for miles without falling through a weak place? How would you like to be really cold?
I shivered as I asked myself that last question. I remembered, not with visual recollection but with blank sensation. Cold was a pain that burned all over the body. It was dark sometimes, but not always. It lay at the bottom of the world under the half-miles of trees, brush and algae that made the top where I lived hot and beautiful. I needn't have stayed so near Indigo's resting place, but the fact was that it was safer in these parts because the bigger insects had been scared away by her artifacts.
As I lay breathing murky air and thinking without direction, a call came to me. I rolled over and listened intently.
"Another one, Reee," said the soft voice in my head.
"Where?"
"Toward the land of Desolation."
A few minutes later, as I climbed down the giant tree to get to the sod mounds a thousand feet below, I came across a raised yellow blister on a limb. Crouching beside it, I blew air on it and it made a mewing sound and then flattened out and slid to the underside of the limb. I waited and soon the thing stuck a bit of itself around the wood to see if I was still there. It quickly dropped to a lower limb, slid underneath it and scurried toward the outermost tip where I couldn't follow.
"Emeroo, there's a yellow blister on my tree," I said. "Size?"
"Five inches across."
"Scream at it. It will come back to the bottom where it belongs."
"Indigo is the cause of it," I said. "She's frightening everything. Why don't you do something?"
Emeroo didn't answer me. I stood screaming at the little blister for a couple of minutes and it suddenly shrieked, let go of the tree limb and fell out of sight. I continued my descent. Beyond an arm of the rolling white meadows were some moss plains, jungles and mountaintops called Desolation. They were inhabited by things ferocious and ugly enough to curl the ears of Belios. Another blue boy had been fabricated but I had no idea why he would go to Desolation when his reason for existing was to do away with me. Maybe Indigo had sent him there to lure me after him so I could get eaten by a spider or a pede.
In no mood to get eaten by anything, I wandered through the sod mounds whistling for my klufe. Not only did she fail to come to me, she didn't even fly in the sky overhead.
"Belios!" I shouted, in case she was lying on top of some trees to my right. Ahead stretched a strip of meadows twenty miles wide and I preferred to ride above them that day. It was bright and hot and the vembers would be active.
A sudden wind storm came along in the form of a black funnel that danced in the sky like a maniac. It came closer and I could see its bowed shape. It sucked up things through one end and blew them out the other. With a deafening roar it drew nearer the ground, plucked up a forest of trees one at a time and deposited them miles away. I crawled inside a sod mound a few moments before a gust of wind grabbed it and threw it away.
As if I were a piece of straw, the storm tumbled me over the ground. I hugged my knees so I would roll like a ball. All I needed was to be unlucky enough to find an empty place in the ground and I would take the last fall of my life. The wind abruptly stopped and I heard a swift tapping sound. It was the rain that always followed the whirlwind, sheets of water, big gouts of it, and I leaped up and ran for the nearest tree to escape drowning. An hour later I climbed down. "Belios!" I yelled.
A flattie sailed across the sun, dipped in my direction, probably decided it wouldn't be worth it, that I was too little and bony to make a meal; it peeled away out of sight behind the escarpment Drinking my fill from a water cup, I stepped onto the meadow, tested the ground and found it not especially damp. I gathered handfuls of nuts from the moss under the big tree and then I took a deep breath and started my tiptoeing marathon across the meadow. There were no vembers close to the sod mounds, but as I sped across the spongy surface covering a finger of ocean, they began to show, drawn by the vibrations I made. Once in a while a dry vine split under my feet, which always made the vembers attack, but behind me, for I was already gone by the time they arrived. Whenever they seemed about to threaten, I tossed a nut or two and then sped on while they ripped up the spot of meadow and attracted their friends who ripped up other spots.
Moisture ran from me in a regular flow. If I had tried to breathe heavily I would have choked to death so I took in air slowly and steadily until my lungs were completely full, and expelled it the same way.
I ran for an hour, sometimes through herds of vembers, and at last I spotted a dark mountain through the mist that hovered near Desolation. Not only that, but within a few more minutes I saw a small figure moving across the white ground ahead of me. He wasn't running but walked in a sedate fashion and probably made no sounds since the vembers in the area took no note of him. I assumed the figure was a he, another phony boy of Indigo's, but even from a distance I knew this one wasn't blue. Further, I could see he wasn't naked.
About the time he reached the foot of the mountain. I crossed the last lap of territory separating us. He was either reluctant to begin climbing, or he was waiting for me, or both. He idled at the mountain's base, adjusting his boot laces, hiking up his pants, tucking in his shirt, holding a canteen to his ear and shaking it, peering up at the mist, scratching his head, perhaps even muttering to himself.
There were several nuts left in my supply and I threw a few at him as I approached. He whirled and stared at me with his mouth open and his big blue eyes wide. Surprise, surprise, there I was, Reee of the planet Earth, its only real inhabitant, and whoever would have expected to see me?
"Upon my soul!" he said, in a nice deep voice.
"How would you know?" I said.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean people talk with their mouths."
"What do you think I'm doing?"
It was my turn to stand still and look stupid. It had been a fact that his mouth moved when he spoke and I had heard the sounds bursting from his throat. Also every syllable had zipped through my mind in a picture image at the same time. Thinking hard, I scratched my head and tried not to look puzzled.
"How can you speak mind link too?"
"Why shouldn't I? People speak both ways, you know."
I didn't admit that I was too ignorant to agree. As a matter of fact, I wasn't particularly educated in the ways of humans. The dead Martian hadn't spoken mind link but that didn't mean no one but me could do it. No matter how hard I probed through my memories, I couldn't recall just exactly how my mama had talked. She had done a bit of yelling and growling, especially before my daddy tangled with a scarab and came off the loser, but I couldn't recollect if she did any mind communicating. It seemed to me ... I actually didn't know everything about everything.
The fellow in front of me probably sensed my confusion. He grinned, took my hand, shook it a little and started talking about the weather, how hot and damp it was.
"The reason I'm acting silly is because I'm evading the issue," he said.
"Which is?"
"I don't want to climb the mountain." "Where did you get those clothes?"
"My folks gave them to me, naturally. Where else do girls get clothes?"
"Which girls are you talking about?"
His blue eyes had little dark specks in them. I thought I saw them moving a little, like swirling clouds. "Why, us," he said. "You and me."
"You know what I think? I think you ... never mind." I
did my talking to myself for a while. It hadn't occurred to me that Indigo might not know a boy from a girl. Maybe she had gotten a glimpse or two of a boy while people were still living on the planet, and her eyesight or her judgment was so lousy she noticed no difference between her creatures and myself. Or perhaps she had forgotten to tell this one what he happened to be. Or I might be the one who was mistaken.
My thoughts limped along, but then the boy did something that emptied my head of everything but wonder. He took off his hat and a flock of hair the color of thistle down fell onto his shoulders. The only thing I could do was stand and look stupid all over again. Never in my life had I seen anything so beautiful as the hair on that boy's head. He had no modesty whatsoever, saw me admiring it and gave another silly grin and brushed half a dozen curls back off his forehead. They fell down at once and I felt my fingers itch to feel them. He wore short blue trousers and a blue shirt. His cap was blue; so was the canteen at his belt. His feet were bare. Had he been human he would have been about fourteen years old.
"I have to go to Desolation," he said. "Do you want to accompany me?"
"Only a plant would be dumb enough to go up that mountain, and I happen to be made of flesh and bones." "Would you like to stroke my hair?" "No."
He shrugged and looked indifferent. "Suit youself. Goodbye." Up the mountain he went without another word or a backward glance.
"What's up there that you think you have to see?" I yelled.
Pausing at the first ledge about thirty feet above me, he sat down and dangled his legs. "I dropped something from my aircraft and need to retrieve it."
"The only aircraft you've ever seen was in Indigo's mind! I don't see why I should come up there with you. You'll just try to throw me off a high place."
I wasn't at all sure I liked what there was to see in his expression before he turned away and resumed climbing. He was smug, sure and cocky. A good description of his attitude might have been condescending. He climbed without bothering to notice if I was following, as if it would be the farthest thing from his mind to imagine that I wouldn't. Naturally I had to do it, just to see what else he might think that was dumb or dangerous or futile on his part.
The mists in Desolation had something to do with travelers' reluctance to visit there. Thick and real, they swirled up from between rocks or down out of the sky. The sun was blocked out and the atmosphere thickened so perceptibly I kept trying to shove it from in front of me. Thinking hard about yellow hair, I was preparing to consider the startling possibility that the owner of the hair might conceivably be human when a boulder the size of a flattie landed beside me, showering me with granite splinters. I started to yell something fresh and smart alecky, but then I shut up in a hurry. Who was in the mood to dodge boulders all day? Not me. Also, here was an opportunity for me to learn something of Indigo's powers of perception. Did she know she had missed me? Was she aware that I still crept up the rocks after her? More important, why was the boy climbing this mountain? There were surely easier ways to try and kill me.
Grunting as I hauled myself up over a ledge, instinct or superhuman reflexes made me shy to the side as a shape reared in front of me. Something sailed past me and fell. I heard it land on a flat rock about twenty five feet below. Secreting myself in a nice dark niche, I relaxed and waited. After a while the boy climbed up past me and continued onward. He wasn't making very good time, since one of his legs dragged. I hoped he hadn't landed on his pretty face when he hit that rock down there.
Indigo wasn't a fool. I hadn't made any noise while I climbed yet she had known I was still healthy and in one piece. I would have to be more careful; but not too much. The blue boys were never as sharp as their parent. The one I followed took time out to lower another boulder in my direction, but his aim was bad and it came nowhere near me. Once I heard him give a weak scream and guessed he had met with a rock crab. He wasn't familiar enough with the local fauna. The crabs could move fast, and if the prey wasn't keen of ear and failed to hear the clicking of big claws and got out of the way, the crab leaped and helped itself.
Obviously one had helped itself to my boy's left arm, for I found a piece of it on the trail above me. He hadn't made any noise so I assumed he hadn't felt any pain, or at least not as much as I would have felt had my arm been gnawed off at the elbow. It was necessary for me to believe blue boys weren't very sensitive to pain.
Nothing crept upon me as I skinned up an almost vertical cliff. I was all ears as I found niches for fingers and toes. My most formidable enemy was the mist that seemed to sit on my head and shoulders like a lead blanket. I slowed my climbing as I neared a rock plateau. Probably the blue boy would be waiting for me with another boulder, and I didn't doubt his ability to handle it since he had no doubt grown another arm by this time.
My thinking wasn't anywhere near right that day. The boy wasn't even vaguely interested in killing me and dropped the boulders to stop me from following him. He had a more mature plan in his squashy head than simple murder.
The rock plateau was one of the few places in Desolation where the sun shone, and as I slowly and cautiously hauled myself up out of the gray mist, I had to take time out to groan a little. Off to my right, with Sol glinting up a storm of brightness on its metal body, sat a pob, while straight ahead and just within my range of hearing stood two figures, only one of which was human. The other was a boy with yellow hair and no heart.
The human was a woman, and she was being foolish at the moment, cooing and making over the boy as if he were a baby or a pet. I figured she liked his hair too. Anxiety dripped from her voice as she said something I didn't understand, but I knew her intention by the way she tugged at the arm the boy had grown within the last few minutes. She meant to put him in her craft, settle him down until he was nice and comfortable and then she would ask him questions. She would get no honest answers. Indigo had known the pob was there and she sent the boy so he could take a long ride and carry my blue enemy to the colony where humanity was dug in and trying to survive.
I let out a screech and climbed over the ledge as fast as I could move. "Hands off that creature and back away quick!" I yelled. "He's just one of Indigo's boys and you don't want to go feeling sorry for him!"
The boy giggled behind his hand and I knew it was because the woman hadn't understood a word of my silent speech. As a matter of fact, she looked too astonished to understand anything, simply stood frozen and gawking while I tramped across the rock and swung a fist at the boy. I intended to dent his features a bit so she would realize he wasn't real. He ducked with grace and, as I had swung too hard, I went all the way around and sat down hard.
It was doubtful that many colonists in space hadn't heard of the lone orphan on the homeworld, how intelligent and attractive she was, and how important and essential to everything and everybody she was. That was, of course, myself. I was real, and the boy was a sack of empty air, only he stood all handsome and unruffled with a brainy expression while I was parked on my behind looking as if a rock crab bad sampled a piece of it. For the first time in my life I regretted living like a naked savage. It was embarrassing to be outdone by a scroundrel of Indigo's breed.
He got my head in his belly but the woman was too dumb to notice the blue color of the air rushing from his mouth. She screamed, more in fright than anger, took a rope off her belt and tried to hogtie me with it. I wrapped it around her and, while the boy straddled my back trying to beat my head in with his flabby hands, I tied her up good. Or almost. Somewhere the boy found a rock, thankfully a small one, and bit me above the ear. It didn't knock me out but it made me sick. As I suffered with heaves, the boy untied the woman and they both got in the pob. They sat there arguing, and by and by I was able to get on my feet.
The woman hadn't appreciated my getting walloped so cruelly and she complained loudly enough for me to hear her. The boy was gesturing toward the controls and indicating that she should get into the air in a hurry. She didn't seem to want to do that, appeared to prefer hanging around to see what the naked heathen outside was going to do. I was still heaving and collecting considerable wrath in my soul against the boy and the evil creature that had spawned him.
While I staggered about trying to decide whether to live or die, and while the woman and boy wrestled in earnest over the pob's controls, a scorp came down her piece of mountain to see what all the noise was about. She was an unconcerned specimen of mayhem for she hadn't much to worry over, being ten feet long and exceedingly fat, ugly and powerful. I was bellowing "Ho!" and "Ha!" and swearing because I had forgotten how to talk. The couple in the pob were oblivious to everything but their own private quarrel. Outside, the scorp touched the spongy exhaust tubes on the tail of the craft, decided it didn't like the looks of them, stuck its stinger through them and then made as if to withdraw. When the stinger didn't come out fast enough to please it, the bug heaved mightily and the whole pob rattled from front to rear.
I could see the bug leaning back and straining the wrong way to free its jewel. The pob raised off the ground. Inside, the woman was frantic. I knew the boy wouldn't work too hard at getting out, for his mission was to fly in space and, unless Indigo had given him more imagination than she usually gave her boys, this one wouldn't consider any other course. As for myself, I was courageous but not brainless and had no intention of going near the scorp which was becoming more insane by the moment.
Onto this spectacular scene came another pob, straight down out of the sky, so rapidly and so close to our small area that I thought it must be rendezvousing with the first machine. The pilot didn't exactly lose her bearings as she took in what went on below, but she dipped and rose nervously and then made an erratic circle to get back to her first position directly overhead. At about that time I was wondering if her craft had a weapon like the signal station on the rolling white meadows. Whether it did or not, the pilot created no fire and smoke, just hovered and observed and probably signalled with her radio.
Meanwhile, the door of the pob on the ground opened and the woman tumbled out. She yelled for the boy to escape while the machine lurched like a bubble in a water cup. I was surprised when the boy crawled to the door and fell out. He sat up straight but made no other movement, not even when the woman began yanking on his arm. The scorp finally got rid of the pob and headed toward breakfast. Screaming her head off, the woman circled toward her craft, reached it from the far side, jumped in and turned on the motor. She watched while the scorp came up behind the boy and lopped off his head. It didn't seem to matter to her that his blood was blue or perhaps she was too frightened to see straight. She shouted something at me, gave me a venomous glare through the windshield and took to the sky. No doubt she considered me a murderer and preferred to crash rather than stay in Desolation with me, or perhaps she believed the pob would fly. Climbing a zigzag course for a few brief moments, she leveled off, slanted sharply, barely made it over the ledge, whined and coughed and spat and limped into the mist. She was too close to the ground not to be in bad trouble.
The pilot of the healthy pob tried to track her but must have lost her in the heavy fog. I climbed down the mountain and started running back the way I had come, toward the sod mounds.
It took me most of the day to find what had happened to the woman and her little ship. If she hadn't been such a flier, she might have done everyone a favor and died in an ordinary crash. As it was, she fought to stay aloft and succeeded until she found herself above an ocean of glittering blue foam. Indigo probably helped bring her down with fabricated spears or a net. Anyway, I stood on the edge of green moss, looked at a tiny silver tail sticking out of the blue ocean, and I felt lower than low. At last my enemy had what she wanted—a genuine, honest-to-goodness human being to mess around with. From now on, her blue boys would be every bit as canny as she cared to make them.

Chapter V
Nawhana was on one of her frequent rampages. I sat in my big tree and watched while she wreaked destruction among the sod mounds. The pob in the sky annoyed me. There had been too many of them around of late and I was beginning to feel the press of overpopulation. Nawhana took no note of the aircraft, being ignorant and unnecessarily savage. Her sole desire was to live in the shelter of thick weeds, hidden and protected and out of sight of her enemies. She hadn't a great number of the latter but her instincts had not altered with her size, so she longed to live in the darkness of the bottomlands. Gas and terrible creatures made that impossible so she lived aboveground, unhidden and unprotected, and once in a while she tore up the environment to vent her hostility.
Today she uprooted sod mounds and scattered their substance on the wind. Occasionally she found a blue boy growing in the shadow of one of the growths. Casually and clumsily she snipped his umbilicus and dragged him away to be quartered. Usually he was well into his spiel about how human, compassionate and bewildered he was when the great scarab nipped him in the bud.
I didn't have my thinking hat on that day, or I didn't know much about people in spite of the fact that I was one. Both failures were mine and spelled gross ignorance. When the pob in the sky suddenly developed a long finger that threw yellow beams at Nawhana and began to cut off some of the hair on her feet and even came too close to taking along some of her toes, I acquired the brilliant idea of educating the pilot as to the worthlessness of blue boys. Intending to enter the battle arena and dissect a boy in the pilot's plain view, I stepped forward and got a piece of my own hair burned off. Luckily I hadn't stepped too far forward and returned to the protection of my tree before I lost anything else. The pilot was obviously berserk and didn't care who she maimed.
While I sulked in shadows and safety, the big bug named Nawhana remained a target. I was too angry to notice that the rays from the gun were doing everything but actually hitting her. Smoke from singed vines rose and made me think considerable damage had been done. Nawhana was groaning as though mortally wounded, and in the meantime I became more undone by the minute. Feeling a closer relationship to the scarab than the fool in the pob, I decided to draw the fire to myself and took off fast toward the rolling white meadows. Naturally I knew almost at once that I had made a mistake.
She knew better than to come too low over the vembers, so she kept her machine out of the reach of the leaping beasts, but she waited until I arrived at a flat area and then she dropped a net behind me. Of course I knew then that the attraction of the day had been me all along and that the persecution of Nawhana had been a lure to bring me into the open.
I didn't know the net was after me until I heard its metal rim scraping across the porous surface of the meadows. It was about twenty feet across and coming too rapidly for me to escape to either side. Throwing myself onto my stomach, I watched it speed over the ground toward me. At the last moment, I reached out for the metal rim, flipped it up, immediately let it go, and the net swept on over me and scooped up a vember.
I almost got killed because I laughed so hard. A vember behind me tried to grab me in a fond embrace. I made like a slippery snake, shied off and then tippytoed away. The pob overhead was going slightly insane because even though it was a good-sized machine, the fat and maniacal vember in the net was doing some strenuous calisthenics that threatened ID draw the pob off course. So I was bursting with silent laughter and tiptoeing in enemy territory when the pilot got spiteful and dropped net and vember practically on my head. The vember bounced "on its expanded chest, a piece of net hooked on my hair and carried me upward a few yards until the hair came out by the roots and I fell on my backside. That did it. I hadn't felt in a good mood all day, had been grouchy and unhappy to start with, but as I leaped up off the meadows and shook my fist at the pob, I had vengeance in mind. I could have sworn I saw her staring down at me with a big gleeful smile, which showed how little she knew about the owner of Earth.
My fingers went in my mouth and I produced the longest, loudest whistle of which I was capable. Meanwhile the pilot was trying her best to take photographs of Nawhana who kept hopping around tearing up sod mounds and tossing dirt into the sky. The woman didn't see my old trustworthy friend named Belios winging like a leathery demon, failed to hear the awful screeches of a cranky creature who had been awakened from a nap.
Scant inches from a vember's fangs, I tiptoed for dear life in a circle that widened and gave me room to see my klufe arriving like a bad dream to scare the lights out of the pilot No doubt she suddenly recalled everything she knew about my own personal pob that was made of tough bones, old leather and wicked brain cells. She got out of the area fast didn't even take time to watch me climb aboard my vehicle, which was a shame as Belios and I did our thing with more grace than usual. My klufe didn't try scraping me into jelly on the meadows, didn't attempt to unseat me by flying upside down, nor did she show any bad manners at all but obeyed heel pressure as if she read my mind, banked beautifully and climbed perfectly, her angle such as to give me wind in the face but not so much that I couldn't see the target.
The pob could have lost us if the pilot had simply gained altitude instead of trying to outmaneuver us. Nothing could out-fly an angry klufe and since Belios had been born mad she couldn't be beaten in the air. Once she got above the pob, and she did so right away, the pilot couldn't evade us without coming straight at us. This one didn't have the nerve. She skimmed ground for a while, waiting for a break that never came. When she realized I intended to force her to land, she panicked and tried a straight climb. Belios bumped her with a wing and the pob jerked, rolled and finally skittered into a landing on a moss plain.
The pilot was a nice person who fainted often, like when Belios parked us on the Scar, or like after she climbed down my favorite thousand-foot-high tree, or like after a scorp chased us through the sod mounds, or like when I took her to see Indigo. Her name was Chotta, she lived on Mars, her parents worked in a cannery and her cousin had embarked on a deep space probe. I really didn't understand any of it except that Mars was a red light in the sky. There were twenty million humans on Mars and two on Earth. All wanted to join the latter two and would have if it weren't for the presence of the blue thing that threatened every kind of life.
"You know, don't you, that Indigo isn't a thing?" I said to her, after I learned to talk all over again.
"Why do you do that?" she said, agitated and aggrieved. "Why is everything personified in your mind? Only people are people. The blue entity is neither an animal nor a person. It's a plant, like the mushrooms growing in the sod mounds."
"We're not sure what she is."
"Obviously I haven't taught you properly since your speech makes no sense. When you speak in the singular, you should say, 'I'."
"And when you aren't alone, you shouldn't."
"Ahhhh, take me to the signal station and end this torment. I hate this place."
"I thought everybody wanted to come back here to live."
Chotta's lean face was somber. "Seen from the air, it's beautiful, and of course it's the home of our ancestors. It's the only planet in the system that really suits us, but what a horrible place it is!"
"Tell me more about the flames."
"Only if you get me down off this stone stalk," she said, referring to the Scar. "Not via your hideous flying beast! You have to lead me to the signal station, and you must promise to accompany me home."
"Home?"
"Mars."
"This is my home; this world."
"It's only for a visit. We'll bring you back here."
I sat forward, spat over the side of the Scar, grinned and made Chotta shiver.
"You have such strange green eyes," she said. "In fact everything about you is strange. How have you managed to stay alive?"
"The flames, remember?"
"Well, I don't know what else to say. The heat is bound to get rid of the blue things. Most of it is concentrated in one area, and we believe that if we kill the majority of the creature, the whole thing will die."
"It won't."
"You're a sweet child, a dear little ... what do you know about anything when you're so uncivilized?" "I remember what that means," I said. "Don't be offended."
"I'm not. I'm glad we talk a lot because the more we do, the more words and meanings I remember. I think maybe my parents were quite intelligent."
Chotta's smile was so pained that I laughed.
"The flames," I said. "Explain."
"Like an ocean flowing down out of the sky, hovering for an instant over the blue mass and dropping quite suddenly. Intensely hot and impervious to wind and moisture, it will lie a fraction of an inch above the plant for exactly one hour before burning itself out."
"A cover of fire? To kill Indigo?"
"If that's what you insist upon calling the thing."
"You can't kill her that way. She has to be reasoned with, coaxed to withdraw, showed cause to care about what she's doing."
"Ahhhh!" cried Chotta in disgust, and thumped the stone so hard with her heels that she bounced close to the Scar's edge. Groaning in horror, she shrank back and glared at me. "You're a little bit like that plant out there," she said. "You don't do anything particularly hostile, you're quiet and uncomplaining, yet you don't accommodate anyone or anything, and you end up by destroying things."
"Try one of these melons," I said, offering her a small yellow one. "I think you'll like it."
Instead of responding she turned onto her belly and crawled into my thistle shack. There she stayed until sundown.
She complained about my nakedness. It offended her. I smiled and shrugged. She sat on the stone with the heavy seat of her pants plastered to her like hot glue. Her short brown hair dripped.
"You have to go native here to survive," I said. "How long have you been with me now? About thirty days, I think. You're slowly being driven out of your mind by those clothes. I don't care how they live on Mars, you can't behave the same on this planet. Every time you take a step I can hear your feet squishing inside those dumb boots. I have to conclude that you're a dumb woman and deliberately unadaptive."
"No doubt," she said coldly, looking down her nose. "How old are you?"
"Fourteen. How about yourself?" "Thirty-four."
"Old enough to be my mother. Why do you shiver?"
"A ghost walked across my grave. I'm not your mother. I have two sons, good little Martians who think that some day they'll come to glorious Earth and live happily ever after."
"If you hate it here, why don't you go home and tell everyone to forget the place?"
Chotta's expression changed from ire to sadness. "I don't hate it. I'm just not accustomed to it."
"Besides being dumb, you're dishonest."
"Oh, shut up. I do hate it, but what difference does it make? Mars is a terrible place to live. We have to come back here and make do."
"Do you like that sunset?" I said. The world was scarlet now, splashed all over and saturated by the bucket of red hunching at the edge of the horizon.
"It's the most frightening thing I've ever seen. You know, the human race is Martian. You were born here, and a handful at home were brought there from here, but they've been absorbed by our culture. All but you."
"Yes, you're right, but it's wrong."
"I understand that remark," she said. "Aside from the fact that I disagree, what did you expect people to do, hang around and let Indigo—that thing—kill them?"
"It makes me wonder what the human race is really like. There's an animal called a nomar that eats only dead things and always runs away from everything despite the fact that it's big, strong and cunning."
Chotta moaned and groaned for a while, even prayed, and then she cursed when darkness came and brought her no relief. Earth was like that, hot and heavy and cumbersome, no matter the hour, day, month or year.
"You have to tell your people not to rescue any of the blue boys," I said above the din she made.
"I don't want that conversation again!"
"Shut your mouth. Indigo makes them. I told you she was intelligent."
"You don't know what you're saying. Flora and fauna are utterly divisible and have been since the dawn of time." "There has to be change, otherwise reality would become extinct," I said. "You have to understand that a small portion of Indigo contains as much personality as a large part. Take one of her boys back with you and Mars will have the same problem Earth has." Chotta only snorted and sniffled, so I said, "Where do you think the boys come from?"
"Mutants, naturally. I mean, that's perfectly reasonable. You don't think I look like the woman of a million years ago, do you?"
"I'm thinking that being a Martian has stunted your growth. I remember my mother—"
"It's true we're smaller than the generations who lived here. We've suffered metabolic changes due to the scanty atmosphere on Mars. We made that atmosphere. At one time there was practically none at all. So now I've explained my size. How are you going to explain yours?"
"Good eating and wholesome exercise?" I said.
"Not a chance. If you keep growing you'll be a giant."
"That's okay, I don't mind. In this place I can use the extra gristle."
She never became accustomed to Belios, cried every time the klufe came to give us a ride. Once she asked me what I'd do if my bird plunked me down on top of the Scar and then went away and got killed. I showed her the ladder of deep niches I had carved on the side of the rock wall. She got an attack of vertigo.
I never changed my mind about her being a dumb woman. She never rid herself of her clothes, occasionally washed them and put them right back on; lost about forty pounds, contracted some skin problems, and looked like the wrath on the day I led her to the signal station on the rolling white meadows.
"If there was anything little-girlish about you, I'd worry over what is going to happen to you," she said, but quietly, so the vembers sliding everywhere wouldn't get nosy.
"Yes, well, what do you figure will happen to me?"
"If some insect doesn't dismember you, the wall of fire we're going to unload will probably burn you up. Try to stay out of the area for the next six months or so, won't you?"
"I'm sorry you didn't like it here. You ought to have tried harder."
"Is that why you kept me so long, to see if I'd like it?" she said.
"Partly. Mostly I wanted to impress on your mind the danger of the blue boys."
I didn't expect it and when she suddenly leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, I was half startled out of my wits. I went away and stood on top of a sod mound and watched her as she sat on the signal station and waited for a pob. It wasn't long in coming, buzzed over the meadows, dropped a harness and lifted her up and away. I was left quite alone with a cheek that itched and throbbed in a strange way.
Naturally I had to go and tell Emeroo about it, not that there had actually been enough to it to make it a topic of long conversation, but the fact was I felt more lonely than usual. However, my intentions were thwarted from the outset. First of all, I couldn't find the quartz tunnel leading to the bottomlands. It had gone away, dissolved, disappeared without a trace. The jungle growth where it had been was thick and green but not with the substance of my only friend.
"Are you being contrary again?" I yelled, standing where the tunnel used to be. My hand closed on a large thorn. "I wish you'd stop hiding from me! Do you think life is some kind of game? Now I have to go to all the bother of finding you!" The thorn pierced my thumb. Sucking the sore thing, I worked my way through the jungle and tried not to think about solitude.
When the silence of the world got on my nerves, I yelled, "I lied to Chotta! I kept her here so I'd have someone to talk to. They all hate this planet and that's why I have to live by myself. I think my problems are all your fault. I don't know why, but I think it!"
The first thing that happened to me after I kicked a hole in the moss big enough to skin through and slid all the way to damp turf on the bottomlands via a fat reed was that a dango jumped on my back and tried to hitch a ride and eat my head off at the same time. Scared and mad, I forgot what Emeroo had taught me and wrestled with the beast. We were about the same size but it was stronger, grabbed me by an ankle and swung me around, trying to brain me on the tree trunks growing all around us. It accomplished at least part of its intention for I suddenly went unconscious. When I came to, I was being carried across the muddy ground by a large blister. Sprawled ungraciously on its soft top, I enjoyed a comfortable enough ride, except that I knew it would terminate when I was feasted upon by the thing and her relatives; if the gas didn't get me first.
Simply rolling free, I stood up and started yelling at the only friend I had in the world. "You see what you almost did? You nearly got me killed! Do you want to know something? I don't care where you are and I don't care if I never find you again. Do you think I need you? All you are is a great big pain!"
A loud rustling sound behind me caused me to move in a hurry, sideways, for I was ever cunning even when brokenhearted, after which I dashed forward and again moved sideways until I evaded whatever it was that had fallen in love with my smell. Darker than the innards of a deep hole, the bottomlands seemed like hell to me then, a place of banishment, suffering, hopelessness and every other bad thing a fourteen year old could think of.
"I mean it, Emeroo!" I shouted. "Don't you come bothering me anymore, not even if I have one leg in the grave! You're a friend for idiots and simpletons of which I'm neither!"
Half a dozen things ganged up on me in the dark, but I was too upset and enraged to let them get a good hold on me: I kicked and spit and slugged until they backed off for a moment to reassess me. I dropped flat, crawled away for a few yards, stopped moving altogether, and they lost track of me and started fighting one another.
"Emeroo," I bellowed, too emotional to have any sense. "How dare you abandon me?"
Things began moving toward me in the darkness.
"Don't you care anything about me?" I cried. "I thought we were friends! I thought you loved me!"
I had no choice but to take to a tree trunk and start climbing. Below me things also climbed, some slowly, some with agility, all blind but possessed of keen hearing. After a while I crawled to the end of a fat limb and felt around in the blackness, encountered a fat hollow reed, transferred to it and continued upward. I dug a hole in the moss plains and emerged into my own hot and sunny world that looked gray and empty to me.
"I can't take it anymore," I muttered, and started skipping toward the land of Indigo.
"Going to kill myself," I said. "What's the use of being useless, which is what a person who is all alone is? What else is there to do?"
I ran faster, yelling all the while. "Listen, you blue murdering nuisance, I want you to get it over fast because I don't like the idea of being tortured!"
Indigo made an attractive ocean, not that I knew what one looked like, never having seen one, but she was big and blue and appeared to roll and ripple as she lay on top of what had once been a sizeable portion of forest. She was gleaming and glittering, dark in some places, lighter in others, silent as the bottomlands but intelligent and full of vindictiveness, particularly toward me.
I lay on the ground about two feet ahead of a part of her. "Go on, get it over with, cover me up and smother me to death, I don't care to live anymore!"
Terrible fiend, evil enemy, sheer dummy, she could have had me, but she had to be melodramatic instead of simply lunging and gobbling me up. Ten blue swords did a dance of death over me, swooped into the air and darted down to pause inches from my vulnerable self, and I became so disgusted that I rolled aside and started to get up. One of the spears stabbed me in the rear and I let out a shriek of rage and pain. Then I ran.
Night found me perched on a limb of my favorite tree, feet hanging down, heart at least that low, spirits sagging, tears meandering down my face. There was a bitter taste in my soul. I was a disappointment even to myself. I couldn't even do a decent job of committing suicide.

Chapter VI
Fire came down out of heaven on Tuesday.
I made that up, at least the date part. Chotta had taught me a little bit about time.
As for the fire, it was much hotter than the coal beds in the sod mounds. For another thing, it filled the sky like eternal lightning. I could hear it all the way from the moss plains, so I whistled for Belios and took off to see who or what was intruding into my world. My klufe singed her tail as she banked rapidly and headed away from what she must have thought was the end of everything. Kicking her to attention, I made her pause and tread air while I looked the scene over.
The machine sent by the Martians was a quarter-mile long, with hardly any width to it. Dirty gray in color, it wasn't much more than a series of black holes that expelled red fire for a few seconds, stopped for a half-minute or so, expelled some more red fire, stopped, etcetera. With every expulsion there was a deafening roar. As for the fire, it behaved strangely, lay in space several yards from the machine, turned yellow and orange and subtly but surely formed a flat, thick blanket that began to drift downward.
Indigo was munching the last section of a forest and minding her own business. Fat and sleek under the sun, she looked a pretty spectacular object to me as I reclined on my evil bird and anticipated entertainment. It was too bad the blue menace didn't have a head like most creatures, or so I thought, for the fire would have burned it to a crisp. As it was, the heat had to cook all of the blue ocean to kill it since Indigo was somewhat like a worm in that she had brains and heart in nearly every part.
I didn't know if there was a Martian in the machine, but it wasn't an important issue since the contraption didn't remain viable for long. It headed toward the target in an extremely slow bank, making blankets of flame that joined edges until the single sheet was broad enough to cover Indigo and then some and also blanked out a goodly portion of sky.
The flames made sound. Seemingly from everywhere came a high-pitched roar that set my klufe to dancing on air and caused my temples to pound like thunder. I was almost ready to swear the flame was alive. As it sailed down out of the sky, it began to roll and ripple like a field of grass. Straightening out, the front edge paused about thirty feet above the foremost part of Indigo, and then the blanket rippled, rippled, and quietly lay out flat, and all the while it roared and howled, hissed and consumed oxygen at a startling rate.
Like the wily and hostile fiend she was and always would be, Indigo slid backwards and rose until her position was a quarter-mile higher than it had been. Now she was a sickle moon with her pinnacle poking into the sky. The blanket of flame busily cooked forest and moss plain while the intended victim became the hunter and lunged downward onto the fire-maker. It was like an ocean inundating a coal. The machine dashed to earth, plummeting through the flames it had created, falling scorched, melted and blackened, crashing with booming reverberations and a bright flash of light.
I was excited enough to do a good job of trying to beat in Belios' head. Hadn't I told that silly Chotta not to try baking the enemy? Surely she hadn't misunderstood me. More likely she hadn't believed me nor had she bothered to consider that since I knew Indigo better than anyone I might guess what would harm her and what wouldn't. What I knew for a perfect fact was that my undesirable companion on Earth was practically indestructible; but only practically. How did I know? Emeroo, the infidel, whom I never wanted to see again was always telling me things whether I wanted to hear them or not. For instance, at that moment she was telling me to get away from the area because the flame would probably extinguish itself by exploding.
Pooh. It was a free country and I could do what I pleased. So the flame blanket proceeded to lie flat, cooking my turf for several minutes, after which it went on to extinguish itself by exploding and my klufe and I were hurled two miles into the sod mounds. By that I mean there was a tremendous gust of wind or sound pressure that picked us up and threw us westward. Almost at once Belios tried to get her own power going, at least by aiming her head in the direction she wished to go. She hadn't a chance of getting her wings up or out without having them torn off or broken. She was, however, a headstrong creature and fought the invisible foe by twisting her body until we were broadside to the air tide ahead. This served to slow down our rush so that we began to lose altitude gradually, and when we were ungracefully dumped into the sod mounds we were low enough to be rendered black and blue but not crushed and dead.
Belios was angry with me and thrashed the ground with her tail, obviously intending to pulverize me. I managed to crawl beyond reach until I was behind a mound where I could flop and catch my breath. A blue boy had chosen the same mound beside which to grow and ripen. He pulled the vine from his belly, scratched loose the little root in his navel, paused beside me, smiled in a friendly manner and said, "Could you direct me to your nearest official? I wish to report a crime."
I thought he had a sense of humor and that he meant he was getting ready to kill me. Lying and waiting for the final blow was agony for me and I let out a feeble yodel and squeezed my eyes shut. Where would I get it? In the head, the chest, the stomach? Was someone spouting my eulogy in a soft murmur? All the blue boy had to do was find a sharp stick or a rock. The head. Yes, he would probably brain me.
Finally my strength came back and I opened my eyes. There was no boy crouched beside me or even standing anywhere near me. He was by another sod mound, plucking petals from a white flower and saying, "She loves me, she loves me not"
For some reason it unnerved me. I never liked admitting to weakness under any circumstances yet the sight of him standing there looking so human and yet so alien planted a grief in my soul that I had never experienced before.
He paid no attention to me but continued to strip the flower of petals and softly debated about whether I loved him, which I certainly didn't, but I wouldn't have wished his fate upon him and would have helped him avoid it had I been able. Obviously I was losing my taste for destruction.
A faint buzzing sound came from somewhere far away, and two things happened at once. Belios ceased to pulverize her surroundings with her tail and took to the sky with a mighty beating of her wings.
"Hey, come back!" I called, but she kept going as though she had never heard me.
The second thing that happened was that the boy dropped his flower and began to cry. Meanwhile the buzzing sound grew louder. Its source was apparently the sky. It grew louder and I became uneasier. The only thing that could make noises like that was a swarm of dreeps, but they never flew except when it rained. Nevertheless I scooted to my sod mound, kicked aside a considerable amount of dirt and crawled inside.
There must have been a million dreeps in the swarm that hurtled down out of the clouds. Their form was so symmetrical and compact they looked like a black ball dropping swiftly from heaven. The blue boy had Indigo's intelligence, since he actually was that blue entity and had no personality of his own, so I could only assume his behavior was calculated to impress me. I couldn't figure out why and didn't care, but I was impressed.
He acted exactly as I would have in his position, screamed bloody murder, ran around in circles in total panic, blundered into sod mounds, fell down, shrieked and wept, finally dropped to his knees and hid his head in his arms. The swarm arrived. I expected them to start chomping on him and that he would disintegrate or empty Out an inch at a time. Maybe the swarm opened and closed over him, maybe it picked him up and carried him away, or perhaps each dreep took a quick bite or suck. All I knew, as I hid inside the sod mound and watched in dry-mouthed horror and infinite disgust, was that the black ball zoomed down, touched the boy and continued on down to touch the earth after which it lifted off and zoomed back the way it had come. There was nothing left where they had touched down, not one iota of substance, blue or otherwise.
In their caverns, the dreeps were harmless to animals. In a swarm they behaved differently and weren't at all finicky about what they ate. As I crawled from my hiding place, I made sure the black ball hadn't changed direction back toward me.
I couldn't find Belios, wouldn't have wanted her if I could, felt the need for deep thought and monumental exertion. What I did was climb the Scar, which took me an entire day.
Hungry, full of despair and none too concerned about staying in one place, I hauled myself up over the last precipice and went into my shack to flop.
The next day I sat outside on my rock porch and looked at the world. Cross-legged and with my chin in my hands, I looked out, brooded and mentally chastised everything and everyone I had ever known, particularly Emeroo.
"You think I don't know you could whip her if you wanted to?" I yelled, wincing as the thunderous echoes swept around the valley and rolled back my way.
"What's going on down there that I don't know about?" I shouted. "I have a funny feeling things are going on behind my back! This is my planet! It was made for people, not blue or green squatters!"
The next day, while I was walking on the moss plains, I met Emeroo. Just like that, simple and unexpected, as if I hadn't spent a great deal of time hunting for her. She had to have been aware of it, since little slipped past her attention.
"You're not really a woman so why do you make yourself look like one?" I said.
"I believe we have had this conversation before."
"You have dark green eyeballs with light green around them, and your lashes are another shade of green, while your nose is a little different in color, and so's your mouth and your teeth—"
"You're unhappy."
"No, I'm not. That's a dumb observation. You're shaped a bit like Chotta but you're much taller and slimmer. What have you got inside you? A heart? Any guts? I won't ask if you have brains but I wonder which part of you holds them."
"You're venting your frustrations."
"Why do you have long green hair? Why not short? Why not none?"
"Sometimes I don't answer when you call me, like the other day," she said. "I wanted you to know what it felt like not to be able to find me."
"I didn't feel anything so I guess your experiment was a failure."
"I am like the shining material that grows in shaded ponds. I'm without years. I don't decay. I've learned much about reality."
"I never asked you to tell me that," I said.
"I see things that are gone and things that are coming."
"Like the fortune tellers Chotta told me about?"
"You can't live now. Come with me and live tomorrow. I'll put you in a niche in the cave wall and bless you with temporary oblivion. This world is in the throes of a mortal conflict that will last many centuries. Come with me."
"No," I said. "You don't really want me to come with you or you wouldn't try to coax me, since you know how stubborn I am; but you don't know everything about me."
"To the final tenuous strands of your immortal soul, I am familiar with you."
"Then you know not to tell me what to do."
I went away and returned later to find she had gone. I didn't care, never wanted to see her again, no longer believed she loved me more than anything in the world. As an intelligent being she naturally had her plans and purposes, but she was so alien that there was no use in my trying to discover what she was up to. I had once lived within her body, been cared for by her. She had taught me and traded confidences with me. We had transferred parts of ourselves and had seen how the other half subsisted. Still, I knew very little about her while I was certain she had been speaking fact when she claimed to know all about me.
It didn't matter. I was in a restless mood, needed to be stimulated, awakened and alerted to the necessity of facing each morning with energy. I headed for Desolation.
The sod mounds were shrouded with early morning mist. Birds in the air gave raucous cries, complaining because they couldn't see anything they might swoop down upon. I dropped from the last limb of the big tree, sank to my ankles in soft dirt, hauled free and walked toward the rolling white meadows.
"Help me!"
Certain I had imagined the thin voice, I kept going. Behind me, the plea was repeated.
"Who's there?" I said, pausing.
There came an answering groan and I leaped forward and rounded a sod mound. "You're a switch!" I said, admiring this blue boy more than any other I had ever seen.
"I think I'm dying!" he gasped, showing me a grimace of pure agony.
"It isn't really dawn yet and you can't function except under the sun."
"You evidently haven't witnessed suffering before, otherwise you wouldn't stand there doing nothing. Or perhaps cruelty is your way."
"Or perhaps your creator made good use of that pilot who dived into her. Has she learned everything there is to know about mankind?" I paused and frowned. "Where did you get those clothes? They don't look as if they've been in a crash?"
"I got them from Krak's store, Mars Colony One. As you can see, that heavy rock lies on my leg and I can't move it. Do it for me."
"Rot," I said, walking away. I paused, turned and went back. "You'll have to stop that yelling. It disturbs my peace."
"Blast your peace, why won't you help me? Are you so primitive that you don't know the meaning of charity?"
"I guess I can tolerate hearing some lies today. Where do you come from?"
"The sky, naturally."
"Do tell? What are you doing on my planet?" "I managed to crawl from the wreckage of the flamethrower."
"That's fairly good," I said. "That old piece of hot junk probably landed somewhere around here after Indigo flung it. Too bad, though, because your story isn't good enough. Your boss will have to improve her improvisations, if you see what I mean." I went away and left him moaning and groaning his disappointment in me and fate.
Desolation was cool and darkened by fog that came from cracks in the mountain. The fog blanketed the sky, removed the heat from the air, caused chill gusts to sneak across uneven terrain. I ran from a hairy thing with a tongue, fell off an enbankment of ancient vines and landed on a log that tipped slightly. Fat, white grubs were turned up to the gray sky, and I made haste to lie as they lay, flat and feebly writhing. The hairy thing leaped onto the log, its taloned feet mashing a pair of grabs, its tongue lapping up another.
We feebly writhed, those white, vulnerable worms and I, away from the murderous tongue, tried to move faster, decided to go over the edge rather than toward the far end, piled up on one another, milled in confusion, were aware when the devouring tongue diminished our ranks. I and one grub made it over the edge, I alone scrambled beneath the log, crawled to a distant end and sped away.
Another creature enlisted me to help her carry her bag of young. She tossed a ropy web over me and it stuck fast to my chest. I couldn't retreat because she ran too fast and I couldn't go forward because her great rear blocked the way. Her eight legs moving rapidly, she raced down an incline. Far behind her the bouncing bag of young was dragged along and somewhere in between I worked desperately to keep pace. She jumped cleanly over a jagged rock and as I passed above the sharpest tip I took the ropy web in my hands and shoved down on it. The sharp rock severed it, and I and the bag rolled down the mountain with the oversized mother in frantic pursuit. Since the bag weighed much more than I did, the web across my chest slid and loosened each time I grabbed something to slow my descent. Finally it left me altogether and I was able to hide until the mother passed me.
I spent the night in the embrace of a mondu and didn't even know it. The bed was soft and downy and smelled no ranker than any other place in Desolation. One thing about my mountain in the fog—it was ripe and ready for burial. The mondu was a black, furry mound with eight legs dangling from it. It lived in a big tree, straddling a limb that wasn't too far off the ground. Its legs trailed like limp vines or shaggy leaves that came together with deadly rapidity whenever anything walked between them. I slept' in a depression on top of the soft mound and when morning came and the mondu stirred, I climbed the tree like a shot and went down the other side of the trunk.
A strelk got off its nest long enough to grab me as I walked by. I hadn't seen it because its leathery hide was the exact same color as the sand on which it squatted. The only contrast was in its yellow eyes which lit with a happy glitter at sight of me. Wound up in its long tail, I could do nothing, and I particularly couldn't yell since my mouth was full and muffled. While she held me fast, she dug a hole in the ground with her claw, a deep cavity paralleling another that held one of her eggs. When the hole satisfied her, she deposited me in it and covered me up. Fortunately she had so many eggs that when she sat on the nest, her rear didn't cover my portion of ground. After I clawed my way up to air, I found her back was to me. She was straining to see over her shoulder, loathe to move her position, as I sneaked away on her blind side.
All day I lingered by the rocks near the clearing where a blue boy had gotten his head lopped off not too long ago. Before night fell I found a comfortable niche with a good view and settled into it. They gathered before moonrise, though I heard no sounds. The fog didn't blank out the sky here, and as the big yellow gourd floated into space overhead, I saw that the clearing had attracted more than a few spectators. They hunched on the rocks like sentries, fat and unmoving except for their antennae that never stopped waving. There were dozens of them pressed close together, and they weren't all the same species. Scorps rubbed sides with scarabs, arachnids hunched next to pedes and all kept their eyes on the center of the clearing where six young behemoths formed a circle and began to dance.
I couldn't have been mistaken about the fact that they were dancing. Music was provided by the spectators who rubbed their antennae and filled the air with such high-pitched sounds that I had to stuff my fingers in my ears. The dancers were male and female scorps, scarabs and pedes. They were soon joined by a pair of arachnids, huge and hairy beasts, black as midnight and obviously fond of each other. The males formed a line, the females formed one opposite and all began to lumber toward the center where they touched anetennae, groped and grappled for a few minutes and then backed up again. Meanwhile the music nearly drove me out of my mind.
They did this all night, never changing the routine. The onlookers made noise while the entertainers walked back and forth, meeting and receding. I had to remain where I was until dawn since my hidey hole was directly beneath the swaying body of a scarab.
As daylight broke, the festivities came to an end. Most of the bugs got away in a hurry, scrambling over rocks or each other as they headed for higher levels and the fog. Those who didn't depart quickly were challenged by other species and several fights started.

Chapter VII
He was easy to look at, so I looked at him often.
"You thought I was a blue boy." His attractive mouth was somewhat petulant.
"A natural assumption for me since they and I are the sole intelligent inhabitants of this planet."
"It was lucky for me that you returned from Desolation when you did. I was almost finished."
"It was lucky for you that you bled red blood," I said.
"It doesn't matter now. I'm here, you're here, and I intend to have a long vacation before you take me to the signal station."
"Do you like the Scar?"
"Yes, of course. It was clever of you to stake your dig in such an untouchable spot. Nothing can bother you here, and the view is fine. There's nothing at all like it on Mars. Daylight is white, night is black, and the atmosphere is too thin. We're all getting weak and too light."
"You look fine," I said.
His appetite wasn't as big as mine and his strength often failed him so I went foraging while he stayed on the Scar or hid in thick foliage. He understood that silence was to be his motto wherever he was, except when he was under attack and needed my help, and then he was to yell his head off. His name was Remur. He was fifteen and a Lieutenant in the Martian Kadets. Once he reached his majority of seventeen years of age, he would be transferred to the Army, with the same rank; whatever all that meant. I didn't know, but I was interested in what Remur said. His voice tone was quite fascinating and his facial expressions were a source of much interest to me, as was anything and everything he did.
He insisted that I be clothed and so I made myself a pair of short pants out of ivy. They itched horribly and gave me a rash so I made more out of leaves. They also gave me a rash. Remur made me a beautiful pair out of pink cotton balls that grew in the sod mounds. They were hot and I secretly longed to get rid of them. He couldn't have picked a more uncomfortable fabric had he tried.
"Why would they send a youth oh such an important mission as killing Indigo, and why would they let you operate their flame machine?" I said. "I'm perfectly aware that adults usually take over management."
"True. What you don't know is that Mars is overpopulated. Everybody wants a job and the dangerous ones are palmed off on those who are lowest in line. The Kadet Korp is made up of young people who are willing to take practically any kind of work. Operating the flamer is easy. Anyone can do it I just didn't expect to be tossed out of it and stranded here."
"Why are they so certain they can kill Indigo?" I said.
"Anything can be killed. Even worlds die. Stroke my forehead, won't you? I have a headache."
His skin was soft and smooth. He was a well-built young man with handsome features and silken yellow hair. I sat on the Scar, he lay with his head in my lap and I brushed away his pain while he sang to me. I liked the deepness of his voice, just as I liked all the things about him that made him a little bit different from myself.
When he paused between melodies, I said, "I wonder what makes people lie?"
"What do you mean?"
"I never lie. I mean, what's the point since there's hardly ever anybody around here for me to lie to. There was a woman named Chotta who was down here with me for a few weeks. She taught me how to talk again. She said Mars was badly underpopulated and it was my duty to go back with her and stir my seed into the strain."
"She lied," said Remur.
"She kissed me before she left. On the cheek. That meant she liked me. Lies and affection don't seem compatible to me."
"I can kiss you." Remur sat up, kissed my cheek and lay back down again. "I still have my headache."
I leaned over and stared into his blue eyes. "She also told me a few humans have eyes like yours."
His teeth were even and white. "I sure hope so." .
"But none have eyes like mine."
"There's nothing special about green eyes," he said. "Yours are a little more vivid than usual, but I've seen plenty of people with green eyes. Cover my face with your hair. I can't tolerate this much sun."
"Chotta's skin was much lighter than mine." I let my long black hair lay across him. "Do you suppose I'm completely human?"
He fidgeted beneath my hands. "They say you aren't, but they can't be right. You're a girl. How could you be anything else?"
He didn't approve of Belios. "She's some kind of monster. Worse than the flatties. Ugh, this planet is savage and irredeemable."
"I agree the world is on its way to some kind of major crisis, but my klufe is no more than a product of the times. She's very helpful to me, besides which she happens to be my one close friend."
"Other than myself."
"Right," I said.
I showed him the thorn mazes, pointed out how the muk beans grew in the thickest bushes, told him they were the healthiest food he could eat, even better than fruit.
"I think it would be wiser to eat fruit and go without the added value in muk beans." He was covered with scratches from having crawled into an especially thick bush. "And why don't you set a trap for that horrid beast?"
Nawhana was rampaging through the mazes, tearing up clusters of thorns and tossing them into the neat aisles. She knew we were somewhere about and was mad because she couldn't locate us.
"She's another old friend," I said.
"Are all your friends two-faced?"
"I hope not."
Belios laid a batch of eggs in a nest in the top of my giant tree. Remur and I climbed up to look at them. It took all his strength to lift one.
"We'll throw them all out and that way we won't be plagued with a horde of klufes," he said.
"The bugs would get them and that isn't the fate I wish for my friend's offspring. Leave them be. I only brought you up here to show you how big they are."
"The flatties will feast on them."
"Belios doesn't go far enough away for anything to get them. Be sure not to climb up here alone. She'll be after you in a flash if you do."
"I hope you're more amenable to my desires after our marriage."
"What is marriage?"
He explained. For me it would mean companionship, children and pleasure. Of course I would accept, but first I must introduce him to my best friend. Marriage sounded too important to treat lightly.
"A friend?" he said. "What is it?"
"She's a who."
Now he was surprised. "No one lives on this world but us. Are you certain you aren't imagining this friend?" "Positive."
"Delay our introduction. I really can't believe in her existence."
"Not even after I've told you?"
He was annoyed. "What have you actually told me other than that you've another friend besides the two hellions I've already met?"
"We mustn't marry until she gives me to you."
"Who's going to give me to you?" he said.
"I can't help it if you have nobody here. You'll have to  learn to love the things I love."
"Which of course I'll certainly never do since we'll go to Mars immediately."
"I believe you're quarreling," I said.
"We're quarreling."
"As far as I'm concerned you're alone in your anger."
"Touch me," he said. "You like my hair, my face, my cheerfulness, my affection for you. I'm the best thing that ever happened to you."
"I don't doubt it, but there'll be no marriage without the introduction."
"Why, why?"
"She loves me."
"Then get it over quickly. How many legs does she have?" "Depends on how she feels." "Ugh, ugh, ugh."
Emeroo hadn't spoken to me for a while nor had I called her, yet I knew the quartz tunnel would be back in its old place. Remur and I walked through the jungle and he grumbled every step of the way.
"We marry now, this very minute, and go no further toward an eight-legged mondu or a klufe cousin."
"Note how sweet the air smells this morning," I said. "It's good to be alive. I feel as if I could produce a dozen children."
"Why are we stopping here? Is your friend in the trees? Shall I prepare to defend us against her?"
"She's benign. I wish you would stop worrying. Here is the entrance to the tunnel."
He shrank back as I shoved aside foliage and revealed the glittering cavern. "I've never told you before but I have an instinctive aversion to the color green."
"I thought you liked my eyes."
"All but the color. I think it's because the dominant color on Mars is gray; like death. Green is the color of life. At this moment I feel as if I have one foot in the grave and the other on mud."
"At least you're honest. Come on, I don't care whether you're crazy about my eyes. I know you love me and that's all I want. You haven't much courage, fortitude or imagination, but you're beautiful and you're the boy the skies sent me. I accept you wholeheartedly. Our marriage will be mostly a pleasure."
Remur peered into the tunnel that seemed to be brighter, more glittering and a darker green than I remembered. "There's something dangerous about this. I feel a sense of foreboding. My knees feel as if they're turning into water." He looked at me from the corner of his eye. "Who constructed this passage?"
"My friend."
"An insect couldn't do this. No beast could have."
"I never said she was a beast. I distinctly recall—"
Stamping his foot, he shouted, "This isn't the time for pettiness! I'm upset!"
"I don't see why!" I shouted back. "Why should you be nervous because of another life form? The entire planet is a menagerie!"
"I shouldn't have gotten up this morning. Yes, that's it. I have a bellyache. This simply isn't a good day for me. My thoughts are to take you by the hand, lead you away from here, go quickly to the signalling station and call for a ship to pick us up." "Remur—"
"You don't want to do that?" "No."
"You want to enter this grisly opening, walk down that horrid green corridor?" "Yes."
He clung to my hand the whole time, and the deeper we descended the tighter he held me. His palm was cold and clammy, and I heard his teeth chattering. I wanted to stop and reassure him but he was stubborn and impulsive and might insist that we turn around and go back. Besides, I was suddenly anxious to see Emeroo, happy at the thought that she was there when I especially wanted her.
Actually I dragged Remur most of the way. Somewhere along the course he slipped and fell to his knees, refused to get up and walk and shrieked that I was a fiend for bringing him into the place of death. Impatient, I yanked on his hand and he slid readily along the shiny floor of the tunnel, and that was the manner in which we traveled for the remainder of the trip to the bottomlands.
Her cavern was in the same old place and I marveled at how she could camouflage it from me when I so often knew her very thoughts. She felt beautiful today, and so of course that was the way she looked, tall and slim and lovely as only a green lady who blazed like an alien sun could.
Very slowly she walked from the cave and stopped. I smiled and opened my mind to speak, and that was when Remur screamed. In amazement I looked back at him. He had let go of me and now his hands were at his throat, grappling at the flesh as if he were choking.
"What's the matter?" I cried, suddenly frightened, for I had never seen him look like that. Aware that his stark gaze was on Emeroo, I looked at her. She was doing nothing extraordinary, simply stood there watching him with glittering eyes and blank expression. He continued to gasp and the horror on his face intensified.
"Stop it," I said feebly. "She won't hurt you. What's the matter with you?"
He changed color. Remur lost his rosy tint and became brittle-looking and unlovely. His expression was empty and dead. He continued to claw at his throat as he fought for air.
His knees bent and suddenly he fell on them. He shrieked, then closed his eyes and began to wail.
"Stop it!" I cried to Emeroo. "You're doing something to him! You're hurting him!"
Remur's skin broke at the throat and blue fluid coursed down his chest. I had seen him bleed red blood from his wounded leg, but now he seemed to contain no more of that. Everything inside him was blue. While I stood and watched, his neck snapped as if it were a dry twig and his head dropped to the ground.
"He's a blue boy," said Emeroo, behind me.
I gave a shriek of rage and agony.
"He didn't even know it himself," she said. "Fortunately you brought him here before you were married." "I hate you," I said softly. "Why? Because I show you reality?"
I tried to put Remur's head back on, attempted to close the great split in his chest. It wasn't possible. That which had held him together collapsed with a whispering sound and he turned inside out while I still had my hands on him.
I buried his remains in the sod mounds where I had found him. Locating a sharp thorn, I slashed my leg. The blood came out red. I slashed my arms, the other leg, my stomach, chest, neck, scalp. Every part of me held crimson fluid. It seemed that all my stuffings were red.
I lay on the Scar and tried to find something in me that wasn't human. My pulse? Breathing? Growling in my stomach? I wondered if they were real or simply seemed that way. Remur had believed he was human. Maybe I was also deceived. Maybe I was a green girl.
No matter what I did or thought, the pain didn't ease. I was back where I had been all my life—friendless and alone.
Having lost interest in everyone and everything, I paid little attention a week later when an odd thing happened to me on the way to the rolling white meadows. A flattie came earthward as though it spotted something, and for a while I thought it was me. Usually they didn't bother me since they all knew I was swift, courageous and too intelligent for them. This creature made a swooping dive and something behind a sod mound screamed. Then a naked boy ran out into plain view, stooped to grab up a rock and threw it at the giant flier. Flatties cared nothing about rocks, ate them as promptly as flesh, so this one gathered its big cloak about the boy's missile and then descended to get him. He passed quite close to me as he sped through the mounds. The flattie pursued him until the trees of the forest forced it to give up.
Two days later I was in the air high above Illusion Bluff, schooling Belios, when I saw the boy again. He was directly below me, standing on the edge of the cliff, gazing at the green meadow a few yards ahead of him. It was, of course, a mirage. Actually it was a two hundred foot drop onto jagged rocks.
"Blue dummy," I said to myself, and Belios and I went through our daily routine a couple of times. This consumed an hour and then I had her return me to the Scar. She left and I had a meal of muk beans and apples after which I sat outside and watched the sunset.
"You should have warned him," Emeroo said in my head.
"Who?"
"The man jumped, you know. Illusion Bluff fooled him." "He was a dumb blue boy," I said.
"He was a genuine human. I found him in a deep underground cavern, frozen and in a state of suspended animation."
"Pooh!"
"Your ancestors weren't savages. They froze that man without killing him. I brought him to consciousness and set him loose on the top level. He was for you. I hesitated doing it since there's so little time left."
"Stop bothering me with phony stories like that; and don't pop into my head anymore without knocking. This body is my furniture and you can't use any part of it without permission, unless you don't mind being tyrannical."
For the heck of it I took Belios the next day and flew to Illusion Bluff, guided the klufe well below the heat waves and had myself a good look at the mess on the rocks.
"You should have told me he was human before you let him loose!" I yelled. "It's your fault he's dead!"
"In your state of mind you would have argued with me," said Emeroo. "I thought you would see him, recognize him as human and learn for yourself."
"Your lessons stink, you know that? Don't talk to me anymore, not ever!"
Indigo was ruining things. Whole sections of moss plains collapsed and big holes appeared in the world. The behemoths in Desolation sent scouts to see what was the trouble.
Huge arachnids prowled in my territory and even sent Nawhana scuttling for safer pastures. I never knew when the ground was going to give way beneath me. Nests of dangoes were disrupted and they began running about topside, blind as night, savage and dangerous as they felt for the entrances into their black underground.
I sat in a tree and watched Indigo eat the world. She was very quiet and fastidious. Bigger than ever, she sprawled like a deep blue body of water, heaving once in a while to remind me that she was alive, sighing now and then to convince me she was intelligent. Occasionally she sent a blue insect after me but my tree was too skinny for them to climb.
The Martians were dropping acid on her. Their planes swooped back and forth cross the valley, spraying fluid in waves of gray clouds that sloshed onto the blue ocean and promptly spilled into openings which she created in herself. Possibly the acid fell through onto ground beneath her. No matter, it didn't appear to bother her at all. She ignored the planes and continued to swallow my environment like some cosmic maw.
I could see her the next day when I stood on the Scar and gazed in her direction. The sun hit her full on and scattered blue light everywhere.
"I thought you were important but you aren't," I said silently.
"And I thought you didn't want to talk to me ever again," said Emeroo.
"That old Indigo is a lot more powerful than you. What will you do when she reaches your cave and eats it up?" "That will never happen."
"Do the Martians have a chance of destroying her?" "None."
"My imagination is working overtime," I said. "I foresee the day when Belios, Nawhana and the others will be unable to live."
"Yes."
"I want them to survive."
"They cannot. Only small life forms can tolerate Indigo. She lets them alone because they aren't worthy of her attention."
"Yet you wanted the things on this world to go on," I said. "I remember how you used to tell me reality would continue."
"It will."
"What about me?" I said. "You will sleep in my bosom."
"That's what you think! I already had enough of that, and I'm not sleeping in any bosom while my world dies."
Indigo must have gobbled like a demon during the night because when I looked for her the next morning I found her all the way around the base of the Scar.
"Fetch me one of the klufe's eggs," Emeroo said in my head.
"What for?"
"I will preserve it."
"I'll fetch you Belios. Preserve her and never mind her egg."
"She is too large. Do as I said and get an egg."
I did as she told me, took the egg to her, and then Belios and I flew to Desolation. We didn't stay long as all the inhabitants were in an uproar and seemed to be everywhere. I took my klufe to the rolling white meadows and set her down in a spot free of vembers. What to do? I'd had a long time in which to make a few decisions, but I hadn't made any because I couldn't really envision a world with nothing in it but Indigo. If I went with the Martians, Belios would be left alone.
"I don't know what to do," I said to myself. "What kind of world is this? What's happening?"
We went back to the Scar. Belios let me off and went winging away, and I regretted not having stayed with her. It was possible that she knew of a safe place and would go there and never come back for me.
Days went by and I was stranded on the finger of rock. Belios didn't answer my whistles. I couldn't climb down because Indigo was all around the base of my happy home. I saw no birds of any kind, no flatties or klufes, nor did I see anything at all moving on the surface below.
The weather was bad, too hot and muggy, so much so that I lay in my hut gasping for breath. My food was gone, I had no water left, and in this kind of weather that meant disaster. With every breath I took I lost weight. I had waited too long to make an intelligent decision. It looked as if I were about to die. On the eighth day I lost touch with reality and began to hallucinate.
A pob and a green klufe vied for my favor. Both wanted me to board them and fly away to safety. Naturally I played it coy and demanded to know which would pay the highest price for me. The pob's pilot was a good-looking blond with brown eyes and a big smile. The green klufe was cool and nervy, confidant and irritating. I watched as they circled in the sky above me and when the ladder hanging from the pob dropped close enough I grabbed it and swung up and away from the Scar.
Since none of it was real and I was out of my head, I wasn't particularly worried, even laughed and sang a little as I swung in the air and was slowly drawn upward. Anxiety came only when I was about to actually go into the machine. I looked about me and tried to blink away the fog in front of my eyes. Down below was my world. Flying close by and watching and waiting patiently was the green klufe.
I suddenly knew keen alarm. Something was wrong. I was in danger and needed assistance. Without thinking further, I let go of the ladder and dropped astraddle the green klufe's neck. Always I had reached out for green whenever times were perilous. All my life I had done so.
"What is that thing?" I said, a few minutes later. "Don't shove me. I'm not going in it!"
"Indeed you are," said Emeroo. "Why are you objecting now? You came with me. You knew what you were doing."
"I never know anything where you're concerned. Quit shoving!"
"The boat is ready for you. Get in."
"That doesn't look anything like a boat. It's a sack. Hold on, creature! I want to know where my klufe is. Where's Belios?"
"Dead. You know that. Everything out there is dead. Get in the boat."
"Kiss me good-bye in case I don't wake up," I said.
Soft warmth touched my face and I went into the sack thinking how odd it was that Emeroo wasn't hard and cold. I wanted my klufe. I wanted my world, bad as it was.
The boat was made out of Emeroo. She was a thing of no shape, form or substance because she didn't have to remain the same, as I did. Her existence was undoubtedly much more mysterious than mine.
The boat was a sack that contained all the necessities of life in it. It was almost like being four years old again and living in the bottomlands in a green incubator. Soon after Emeroo closed the top of the sack over me, I went into hibernation, not exactly a sound sleep nor a state of wakefulness. I simply wasn't all there, mind-wise.
I was adrift on a blue sea that rolled and rocked like a cradle. At times I remembered Belios and Nawhana and all the other creatures of my one-time world, and then I would shed a few tears, but I never came fully awake. Not for five hundred years.

Chapter VIII
I think it was an experiment of Emeroo's, putting me out into the world the way she did that day, and it was done without warning. I simply found myself in a green sailboat on an endless ocean of blue. Spray continually hit my groggy self and I crawled to the side and looked over. It made me seasick so I closed my eyes. After a while I sat up and stared about. The sky was gray and filled with clouds. It looked like rain. The horizon was black, the wind blew briskly. I didn't like a single thing I saw. Trailing my hand over the side, I nearly touched Indigo. Could that boundless stretch of blue be a living thing?
"Emeroo?" I said aloud.
"Yes?" came the soft reply in my head.
"How long have I been asleep?"
"Five hundred years."
"What's happening to Indigo?"
"She is altering her substance."
"What does that mean?"
"It means nothing is stationary."
"Is there any dry land anywhere?" I said.
"There is an oasis off your starboard bow. Your klufe is waiting for you."
She didn't fool me. I knew that whatever waited for me on the little dark chunk of land in the distance, it wasn't Belios. Where was my world? The only thing familiar was the hot, soggy air. At least I wouldn't be cold. Where were the high jungles, bottomlands, moss plains and the place called Desolation? Where were the sod mounds and the rolling white meadows? Where was the Scar and my house?
Another thing hadn't changed. The Martians were trying to kill Indigo. Planes flew overhead and dropped liquid that foamed and frothed on the blue ocean and then evaporated. Evidently the humans trusted quantity more than quality because they continually dumped their poison, at least once a day in several places, and though it evaporated rapidly and didn't seem to inconvenience Indigo, they didn't stop.
The oasis was a mountaintop, ragged but still sprouting a variety of fruit trees and possessing one small lake. From the highest point I could see nothing but a vast blue plain that rippled in the wind like water. I cried when I saw my klufe. Only half-grown, she was the image of Belios, externally and otherwise. The first thing she did was try to peck me to pieces. Feeling much cheered, I peppered her with rocks until she got the idea that I wasn't something to be gotten rid of simply by vain imaginings. After she lost interest in me and began eating fruit from a tall tree, I sneaked up behind her, leaped astraddle her neck, and away we went.
A couple of days later, after I had named her Bellis and taught her some manners, we went for a long ride north. There weren't too many oases in that direction and I vowed not to go that way again. On the opposite course, and a number of long hot miles south, was a great oasis inhabited by insects of all kinds and dangoes and snakes and a hundred other uglies that had once lived in the bottomlands of my old world. The place made Desolation seem like a picnic ground. Besides teeming with murderous specimens that killed several times every day in order to stay alive, the spot must have been the hottest on the planet, which it actually happened to be, only I didn't know it at the time. One thing I observed was that it was too hot for Indigo. Obviously every other place belonged to her while this equatorial sanctuary belonged to the rest of us. In the oasis were bottomlands, upper crusts, jungles, moss plains—all the comforts of home, except it was severely overpopulated and things kept trespassing wherever I went. I built a shack on top of a rock and the next morning I found a mondu on it, its hairy legs dangling past my windows and door like ragged vines.
I named the place Recreation because it would be where I took my vacations. Then I boarded Bellis and flew away to find my original oasis on the mountaintop, which I never did, but I found another just as good and when Bellis made no objections I settled down there and made a shack out of limbs and leaves. After that I looked around for landmarks so I would be able to find the place again. That wasn't so easy. The world was really made up of nothing but Indigo's greedy body and a few little pieces of land. I could have marked the spot by the stars but that meant traveling by night and Bellis never moved a wing after sundown.
My new oasis was larger than the original. It had several lakes and an abundance of fruit trees. The second evening, for entertainment, I sat at the edge of Indigo and watched the Martians drop poison on her. They had stopped dropping it in the heat of the sun, not that it mattered, for at dawn the next day the poison evaporated without having done any discernible damage overnight.
While I was minding my own business just sitting there watching and enjoying the waning sun, a pob came lower than usual and the pilot saw me. I knew it when his eyes went wide with shock and his hands left the controls of his craft. Later I took time to reflect upon it and came to the conclusion that he could be excused for panicking and dunking into the blue. The naked girl who lived alone on Earth must have been a legend on Mars. Legends weren't supposed to be alive and real, particularly not five hundred years after their origin.
The pilot realized what was happening right before he plowed into Indigo. He did what he could to bring the pob up, and almost succeeded, but his bottom hull skimmed across the enemy, promptly turned blue and became a little heavier than before. The craft continued skimming and gradually the whole thing became blue. Suddenly it circled and headed toward my oasis, went up the beach past me at a fast clip and tipped forward onto its nose.
Hopefully I watched but when the door opened and a blue man stepped out, I lost interest. He was just as indifferent to me as he walked to the edge of the beach and waded in. As soon as Indigo reached his waist he started swimming. The last I saw of him, he was a tiny speck on the horizon.
The plane was a curiosity. When I approached the open door it opened even wider in an obvious invitation. I declined to enter, walked around the craft to the other door, waited and watched as it too opened for me. Everything inside was blue. Indigo had gotten in via the rear vents.
"Why do you want me to come in?" I said aloud. "I know you're just some more of the same old stuff that's all over the place. Probably as soon as I got inside you'd act like a pob and fly away with me."
The machine was silent, the door remained open.
"I tell you what," I said. "If I ever feel the desire to take the final plunge, I'll take it inside you, so why don't you hang around here and don't go away?"
I couldn't resist touching the shining hull and then I withdrew my finger in horror. Fully expecting the tip to be blue, I was relieved to see that it wasn't.
"This is temptation," I said. "Give me a little and I'll want everything." Indigo was a canny creature. She gave me a taste so I would take the bite. What I longed to do was board the pob and see what happened. Instead I gave it a swift kick, checked my sore toes to make certain they hadn't changed color and then I walked away.
There was no need for me to worry about losing track of my new oasis whenever I went on aerial excursions with Bellis. Somewhere on my personal piece of turf was a glittering green beacon that continually flashed on and off. It moved around and always stayed hidden from me. I couldn't find it, no matter how diligently I searched.
One night I dreamed about a boy.
"What is it about my eyes that bothers you?" he said.
"The color. You and I have a lot of Emeroo in us."
He looked annoyed. "Possibly, but what does it really matter? Look about you. Whatever you see is steeped in whatever came before it. I mean, we are what somebody else was, at least physically. Right?"
"How should I know?"
"Odd you should touch upon the subject of ignorance. It's one of the reasons I'm here. Besides being many other things, I'm also an accomplished tutor of etiquette."
"Who needs it?"
"Only boors brought up in the backwoods."
Funny dream. I opened my eyes in the morning and knew that somewhere on my oasis was an unattractive boy with much intelligence and a snobbish personality. I disliked him a great deal. Going out of my shack, I shouted, "Where are you? I know you're here! I want to tell you to get off my island. This place is mine."
Not even bothering to take time for breakfast, I went on the hunt for the squatter. Three hours later I found him in a valley. His name was Moss. He was tall, skinny, bony and about as ugly as anyone I had ever seen, which really didn't say much, considering that I hadn't met too many people.
However, he was ugly. His jaw was long and abnormally pointed, he had impossibly large round ears, a long, long nose and eyes as green as grass. His skin was pale, his hair sparse and sandy in color. He wore pants and a shirt made of yellow thistle down. Though I called him a he, it wasn't appropriate. Not only was he not a male, he wasn't a female either.
"As you can see," he said, dropping his drawers, "I'm neither a boy nor a girl, so you needn't worry about love while we know each other."
"What you are is Emeroo, come to keep me company."
"As a matter of fact I'm a scientist," he said.
"What for?"
"To weigh, measure and evaluate your physical environment."
"Pull your pants up. For some reason you're obscene."
I was jealous of his shack. It was actually a house, roofed, windowed, and two-doored. Made of wooden strips, it was the most marvelous construction I had ever seen. He explained to me how he had built it. Halfway through my ordeal of listening, I called him a liar.
"You haven't even heard it all," he said. His voice was interesting, smooth and resonant. It wasn't like mine or Chotta's or the male Martians I had known. "I have tools," Moss continued. "Even as the brain is a tool of the self; things you use while creating; understand?"
"Where are they?"
"In that box over there."
It was made of green wood. "I can't get the lid off," I said, sitting on the box and sucking my sore fingers.
"That's because children aren't supposed to trifle with the belongings of adults."
"I admit I'm a child. Now show me any adults around here."
"You're an affront to my senses. Firstly, there's a distinct odor wafting toward me from your direction which, of course, is the keen animal smell indigenous to your species, which of course means—"
"Is it okay if I refer to you as a he, or would you rather be an it?"
"He will be fine, though the choice is pitifully indicative of the condition of your id. Secondly, the pitch of your voice grates on my ears and makes the small hairs on the back of my neck rebel. It tickles. Soften your tones; be less strident."
He finished telling me how he had built the house, which bored me but made me more curious about the green box. He was much taller than I but weighed about the same; skinniest person—creature—I ever saw. Ugly, too. Rude, also.
He set himself up as a scientist and, with tools which he never let me lay a finger on, made a long wooden table and several wooden cups. "Fetch me a sample of the blue beastie," he said, offering me a cup.
"Maybe tomorrow," I said. I sprawled on the limb of a fat tree, lazy, sleepy, comfortable.
"Sometimes tomorrow doesn't come. Fetch me the sample."
"Go get your own sample."
"Rule number one: treat me with respect and I'll return the courtesy."
"Very well. No, thanks, I don't feel like going to get a hunk of Indigo for you."
He came toward the tree with something in his hand. "What's that?" I said. Too lazy to raise up, I strained my neck and saw him lay the object on my limb, just where it grew from the tree. An instant later, I fell onto the ground with the limb on top of me.
After getting over being angry, I climbed down from the top of a high tree where I had gone to sulk. Approaching the table, I said, "I'm interested in that tool you used to lop off the limb."
"You can't play with it."
"I'll bring you a cup of Indigo."
"Bring it for nothing."
"Why should I?"
"Because I've been fair with you," he said.
"I don't see how. This is my island and you're squatting on it without my permission. I was minding my own business in that tree and you tried to break my neck by dropping me onto the ground. I'll tell you one thing, I'm never running errands for you. Go get your own sample."
"I'm afraid of the blue creature."
"Who isn't? A hog like her is enough to scare everybody. She's only swallowing the world."
Insisting that he dared not go near Indigo, he finally relented and traded the use of the tool for a cup of blue substance. I expected Indigo to leap out of the cup or something equally foolish but she lay like quiet water, and Moss took the container from me and quickly covered it with a flat stone. Leaving him to his inquiries, I went off to try out the tool.
A good length of time passed before I returned it to Moss. "Where are you going?" he said.
"To get my knife and find another island. You think those tools you're using are innocent, but they aren't."
"What have you done?" he said, gazing about in surprise. "Where have all the trees gone?" He looked at me. "That's dumb, that's really dumb. You cut yourself out of a home. I mean, surely you left something standing upright."
"If you had a thing that required only the touch of a button to make a blade cut through anything, what would you do? That is, if you were human? I did only what was natural."
"But mostly dumb."
"At least I sawed you out of my life. So long."
The new oasis was fine, except it was a lonely place to be in even though I had Bellis to talk to, but she was innately hostile and I had to remain on the alert in the event that she took a notion to hit me with her tail.
I went back to the island after several days had gone by. Moss was sitting in a chair beside his experimental table, one knee propped on the other and his chin in his hand.
"I thought maybe you could use some company," I said.
He didn't change his position. "I've been expecting you."
"One more wise word and you'll be here alone till you roast."
"I shall pretend you came back after me for my sake."
"You don't have to," I said. I'm not in the habit of doing anything for anybody, especially since I don't know anybody."
Bellis and I transported him and his equipment to my new island. "I know an oasis called Recreation and want to take you there one day," I said.
"For some reason, the invitation creates ominous vibrations within me."
"Recreation isn't that bad. There are lots of friendly fauna, and the flora is attractive."
He taught me how to examine Indigo under a microscope. "She's just an old plant, like the scum that grows on still water," I said.
Moss thought that was funny and laughed. He didn't think it was humorous when I brought a variety of objects to examine under the scope and one leaped up and hit his lens in two. It was all the same to me, the lens or the whole instrument, since I was curious to know how or if he would replace a broken item. How disappointing it was when he retrieved a spare part from the green box and restored the scope to working order.
"What would you do if the green box became lost?"
"Don't go dumping it in Indigo or anything like that simply to satisfy your curiosity."
"Isn't that what curiosity is for? To be satisfied?"
"Not at my expense," he said.
What was I, anyhow, but a bug under Emeroo's scope? I stood on the highest peak of my island and complained to the sky. "You never asked me if I wanted to go to bed for five hundred years! I'm not your specimen! Who do you think you are?"
I hadn't been born into the best of conditions, but then who had? Surely there was a cloud over every birth. People adjusted to their environment and lived out their days with their own kind. Me, I'd been dropped under the only cabbage in the world, but that didn't give anyone the right to pluck me out of that world.
"Did you ever ask me my favorite color?" I yelled to no one, or to anyone or everyone. "In case you don't know it, I can't stand green or blue!"
A day or so after that Moss said, "I don't believe we are alone." It was afternoon and I was sunbathing on the beach while he fiddled with his scientific equipment.
"What do you mean?"
"Look behind you."
A blue stick was embedded in the sand two inches from where my head had rested. I pulled it free and saw it had an extremely sharp tip. "What the heck do you call this?" I said.
"An arrow."
"I know that! I mean, why are you trying to kill me? I thought we were friends."
"Why do you always anticipate betrayal? Are you the only soul in the world with courage? I didn't throw the missile at you. I've been absorbed in my work and didn't notice it until just now."
That evening I said, "I want to see you eat."
Moss grinned, making his nose look longer and sharper than usual. "Still thinking about the arrow? The fact is there's more than one squatter on this oasis. Has to be. One and one always make two, and you and I were the sole occupants of that—"
"I just want to make sure you're real. I recall that the blue boys never ate food."
"You certainly don't suspect I'm one of them."
"Whatever you are, you don't amuse me. How can I sleep if I can't trust you?"
I scrounged about in the mountains until I found a thistle grove, and from there I descended to the beach with a supply of muk beans. I boiled them in water with salt and onions to make them tasty. Then I offered some to Moss. So absorbed did I become in watching him chew and swallow them that I didn't realize he was eating them all. When they were gone, I had a growling stomach to console me and I had a sneaking suspicion that I still didn't know what kind of a person he was. His belches and groans sounded genuine and human, but that didn't prove anything.
Speaking of doubts and confusion, Indigo would have pleased someone who loved the color blue. No matter where Bellis and I flew, we found only our ancient enemy and a few scattered oases. One day a thing came up out of the blue, and it was so unexpected and unusual that even my klufe almost lost her bearings. As for me, I nearly fell out of my seat.
The thing looked exactly like a vember. My immediate assumption was that it was a piece of Indigo in disguise. It was a large specimen, about twenty feet long with a pointed snout and split tail. The only real difference I could see between it and a vember was in the short, raised ridge on its back.
"Probably a shark," said Moss, after I went home and described the creature.
What was a shark? Why wasn't it blue? Why did it move through Indigo so slowly? Were all the vembers dead? Why were there things going on that I knew nothing about?
I didn't place much credence in the answers Moss gave me. He said happenings ran in patterns. The vembers were a species of amphibian that adapted to their environment with unusual facility. Maybe they were all gone now and maybe they weren't. Indigo contained hydrogen and oxygen, so water animals didn't find her a totally hostile breeding ground. I could call the big gray creatures whatever I pleased, but they were probably sharks. They weren't blue, but Moss didn't think that was significant. Perhaps Indigo didn't care for the taste of fish.
I wouldn't have learned any more about the subject if Bellis hadn't turned into an expert fisher. One day she dived toward Indigo at top speed and remained aloof in spite of my kicking and screaming. Just when it seemed she would plunge into the blue, she pulled up her head, skimmed at breakneck speed and suddenly snapped up a fish in her beak.
After that, she frequently caught fish. I could have caught them myself if I'd had wings. They moved so slowly in Indigo's body that they couldn't escape.
"I want to know just exactly what they are," I said to Moss, so he spent an hour or more explaining their history. "How do you know all that?" I said. "I think you're Emeroo in a funny-looking body with a homely face, and you've been around a long time, but how do you know about oceans of water and all those swimming animals?"
His answers were long-winded and unsatisfactory. He wasn't much of an artist but I made him draw pictures of the ancient world.
"Everything is so flat!" I said. "Almost like it is now. There are no moss plains and jungles. Are you trying to tell me there was an Indigo all those millions of years ago?"
No, but there were oceans that bore a close resemblance to my blue acquaintance. I spent many an hour lying on the beach staring into Indigo. She moved all of herself at the same time so that she was one big, wobbling mass. Her motions were gentle. Only infrequently did a portion of her surface break, and that was when she released a bubble of light blue air that quickly dissipated.
"The Martians are wasting their time trying to poison her," I said to Moss.
"I don't think so. I've examined specimens of her with and without the poison. Those with is are closer to water." "What does that mean?" "It'll be a good world for fish."

Chapter IX
One didn't eat with one's fingers unless one had been poorly bred. One used a fork, knife, spoon, glass, plate—and don't forget the napkin.
"There's nobody here but us and I don't care if you're offended when I eat with my fingers. They're so handy all the time. I don't have to go and find them, or dump bugs out of them, and I don't care if they're shiny or grimy—"
One washed one's feet before coming to the table. One didn't offend one's neighbors by showing up stark naked.
"I don't have any neighbors. These downy drawers have given me a rash. See. I'm not used to wearing anything. Why can't I be plain, simple me?"
Someone peppered the back wall of my hut with blue arrows one morning. I looked up as a stray one sailed in the window. At the time, I was inside and resting from the hot sun and gnawing on a greasy fried fish Moss had caught. Up and on my feet in a flash, I ran outside and saw a blue boy speeding across the beach toward Indigo. In his hand was a bow and across his back hung a bag of arrows. It I hadn't been so angry and disgusted, I'd have been glad to see him, not having laid eyes on anyone but Moss for a long while. Under the circumstances, the blue boy could only be counted as a prime enemy, so I chased him and leaped for him just as he dived into the blue. For a moment I had his ankle in a firm grip and then he was free and gone while my hand plunged" into Indigo. I yanked it out, horrified and certain that I would have to cut it off to prevent Indigo from crawling all over me and eating me up. The hand was its normal gritty color but coated with fish grease.
"She hates fish!" I crowed, and went to find Moss. He rested in his thistle hut, a poor copy of my own.
"I already told you that," he said.
"I mean she really hates them so much that if you're covered all over with their grease, you can maybe go into her and not worry about getting killed. What do you think of that?"
"I don't know. I'll have to look into my microscope."
"I thought you were about to say crystal ball."
"You're fresh, dirty, naked and uneducated."
"Not so much the latter these days, what with all the things you've been teaching me," I said.
The next day Moss came to me and said he needed a box of equipment that was buried somewhere in Indigo. After shrugging and chuckling a while, I went off to hunt for squatters. He followed.
"Where exactly is this box of equipment?" I said.
"I could make you a map."
"What you really have in mind is for me to get lost. If you've changed your mind and decided you don't like me anymore, you can always move. I'll be more than happy to take you and all your junk to another oasis."
Looking down his nose, he said, "You're trying my patience."
I went away and he continued to follow me. "Without the material in that box, I'll not get to do a great deal of research I had hoped to," he said.
"When you first hid it, thousands of years ago, why didn't you do a better job of it?"
"Because I had no idea the world would be in the shape it's in now. Well, of course I had my suspicions, but I'm not a prophet. What makes you think it was buried that long ago?"
"You haven't done anything but pester me for the last five hundred years, so I know it's been a while since you did it."
He gave me a thin, transparent suit that stank exactly like old fish. I held my nose while he pulled it upon me.
"Let go and put your arm in this sleeve."
"I think you're doing this just to get clothes on me," I said.
"When you find my box, pull out the ears on this metal ball. I shall arrange for you to come to the surface."
"How? Why don't you go get your own box?"
"The suit won't fit me, besides which I'm claustrophobic."
"Something besides me smells fishy."
"You're like every paranoid."
"Just for that I'm not going." "Please yourself."
My belt was stocked with compressed molecules of air, water and food Theoretically I carried a swimming pool, a sizeable chunk of atmosphere, a grocery store and a pressurizing chamber with me as I jumped off Bellis and landed in what seemed to be the middle of Indigo. I had already checked out the equipment and knew exactly how it operated, not that I really believed Moss was untrustworthy and might send me into dire danger, but I functioned on the principle that where my life was concerned he wasn't all that much on his toes. The jets on the belt would have propelled me through practically anything so when I fell into Indigo and remained alive without being eaten up, I made ready to jet in some direction. I expected to sink rapidly, as Moss had told me Indigo was turning to water. My fall was gentle and I drifted down into the blue as if it were a deep pillow.
My surroundings were invisible a few yards under and I turned on my headlamp in order to follow the map Moss had given me. Indigo was noisy, like an overgrown stomach. Things gurgled, roared, sighed, groaned, and I was ever conscious of slabs of her body pressing against me. Compressed mols of air continually expanded in my suit and were used and expelled through special vents. By pressing a button on my visor I could bring it to top magnification. Even so, I couldn't see through Indigo more than a few feet.
Impatient to reach bottom, I jetted gently and moved downward. At a depth of a thousand feet I came to solid rock and murmured a few quiet complaints. I was in the bowels of my most deadly enemy and my only benign acquaintance couldn't even draw an accurate map. The chamber he had described wasn't at this latitude, longitude, nor anywhere close by, that I could see. Further, Moss hadn't said anything about the environmental conditions I would have to endure. I was conscious of how far away I was from the surface of the earth. I was more than that in regards to the sounds occurring in the vast alimentary canal above and around me. Maybe Indigo did most of her digesting, or whatever it was she did, close to her bottom layer. It sounded that way to me.
I tried moving without the jets and found that if I made swimming motions I could cover territory at a fair rate of speed. The solid rock under me continued while I swam north for five minutes, and I finally paused to consider the possibility that Moss had wanted to kill me and had sent me on an endless errand. My curiosity might have brought me here but it wouldn't get me out. Supposing I surfaced with the jets? What then? Probably I could find an oasis but it might take weeks, and though the belt held enough compressed food and water mols to keep me alive that long, I had no desire for that kind of escape. I would rather find the cache and the box Moss had described, jet to the surface with it and follow the light of the flare he had promised to throw into the sky.
Returning to the spot where I had first descended, I shone my headbeam onto the rock and searched for a crack or fissure. If Emeroo had built a chamber here thousands of years ago, its exterior wouldn't look the same now. Of course I would never find it if this rock bottom meant that a mountain had fallen here or emerged and shoved things aside.
Indigo swayed and carried me a few yards. Putting my back to that part of her, I bent over and shuffled backward a step or two. My main trouble was that I had always taken for granted that nothing could really harm me because Emeroo was ever ready to take care of me. Another problem was that I was stupid and uneducated, otherwise I would have figured out Emeroo's nature long ago. Perhaps they had schools on Mars that taught people about different life forms. If so, the Martians knew more than I did about the only friend I had. I wondered if Moss was her child, the same way the blue boys were Indigo's. Or Moss could be her in a disguise. Or she might be on some oasis, lurking in a cave or whatever it was she did when she was alone.
"Hey, are you there?" I said in my mind.
"Yes."
"I haven't heard you in a long time." "That's because you didn't call." "Are you Moss?"
"How can I be other than who I am?"
"Where's your dumb cache? I'm tired of floating around down here waiting for Indigo to find me."
"She knows exactly where you are. She's trying to shove you off course."
"How about some directions?" I said.
"Turn half-way around to your left and go forward fifty paces. You'll find a ring on the ground. Lift it."
The ring was as big as my head and was attached to a lid only a bit larger, just big enough for me to drop through the opening under it into black water.
"Hey, where are you?" I yelled.
Under my feet was a grid that suddenly opened and dumped me onto a chute leading into a small white room. The water that sloshed in with me drained through the screened floor. I opened a door and walked into a place of silence.
I was afraid to yell for fear of waking the things that might be skulking in the places I couldn't see. The noise of my heart seemed to be booming throughout my entire body. My feet shrank from the floor yet it wasn't cold through the suit but was in fact warm and comforting. Not a whisper sounded as I walked forward, hugging the right wall. I disliked the antiseptic whiteness of the corridor, the low ceiling that held up Indigo's great weight, the narrowness of the hallway. I thought of the vastness of the blue enemy outside, her mindless hunger, her boundless ego. She hated me more than anything and intended to conquer me one day.
"Emeroo, I think it's all a big plot," I whispered, my throat dry. "I have the crummy feeling that you've spent the past centuries just planning to get me into this place so you could destroy me. Haw could I have been so gullible as to trust you?"
There was no way out. The door behind me wouldn't open. There were no windows, only an endless corridor stretching ahead of me like a skinny white line. The thought suddenly struck me that if I died, the earth would be empty of man.
"You ruined my world, Emeroo!" I wailed, and then flinched as the words came back to me in a deep, sinister echo from the thin regions ahead. "You did it!" I said. "I don't know how, but you did. You let Indigo take away the jungles and moss plains, and without them people can't live on this planet!"
Around the corner was a painting that took up a large portion of wall. It was a white beach bordering a flat Indigo. The sky was light blue, with a few clouds. Up the beach was a patch of trees. In the bottom right corner of the wall were the numbers: 2000. They were a date, I knew, and I also suddenly knew that a date indicated a specific time in eternity. Was this 2000, this time that I spent walking in a corridor past a picture that looked almost familiar? The only thing about it that didn't fall comfortably into place in my mind was Indigo who should have been more puffed up, more real and alive looking. The slab in the picture appeared to be calm blue water, but water was clear, not blue.
I didn't like the picture because it taught me nothing. Also, it wasn't the box which I had come for and which was all I was really interested in down here.
The next picture was of the same scene but the sky was gray and the beach was littered with rotting wood, bogs of green plant life and other debris I didn't recognize. Indigo was different, too. Now she wasn't so blue but was more gray with patches of brown showing.
Picture number three: The slab of ocean that I mistook for Indigo was covered with a thin layer of brown plant growth. So was the beach. The sky was white and the small yellow sun looked hot. The trees were so tall now that their tops didn't show at the line of the ceiling. Picture number four: The plant growth on top of the beach was many feet high, twice as high as the growth covering the ocean. The sky was filled with thick white clouds while the sun seemed bigger and brighter. All that showed of the trees were huge trunks.
The next picture was nothing but a dark splash of color beside which was impenetrable green foliage. The last picture showed rolling white meadows far above which stretched a familiar moss plain.
They were an impressive series of pictures, particularly because I knew they were important, but I hadn't a clue as to what they meant. The only one that made sense to me was the last. Feeling weary all of a sudden, I sat down with my back against the wall. I ejected a compressed water mol from my belt, caught it as it popped up in front of me and put it in my mouth where it broke and became a good-sized drink. Next I had a miniscule muk bean that expanded in the heat of my mouth and turned into a bite almost bigger than I could handle.
That Was all there was in the buried chamber, a series of pictures painted on the walls of a narrow corridor, and there was a small green box on the floor around the last corner. As soon as I picked it up a short tunnel opened in the wall behind it. The space around the tunnel's opening swayed and shimmered, glittered and danced, as if intense energy was being manufactured. Through the hole I could see the body of Indigo. However Emeroo did it, the energy she had placed inside the tunnel pushed on the blue monster and kept her out. With the box under one arm I crawled down the tunnel and started to shove myself away. Two blue boys promptly closed in and grabbed my arms. Another plastered something over my visor so I couldn't see. A fourth tethered my legs so I couldn't kick.
The cave they took me to was on an oasis. There was a throne in it and seated comfortably was the Martian who had crashed his plane in my first island. The only outward difference in him was his blue color.
"Leave the suit hanging about her waist," he told his lackeys who were undressing me. "Her nakedness is offensive."
"That's a Martian expression, not something Indigo would say," I said. "She couldn't care less what I wear."
The blue boys tied me to a post in front of the throne. Daka, the Martian, sat with an elbow on the chair arm and his chin in his hand as he studied me. "A living legend," he murmured, and then in a more lively tone he said, "What's in the box?"
I shrugged.
"Reee," he said, as if he were savoring something he expected to turn sour. "Do you have any rational explanation for why you've stayed alive so many centuries?"
"Who wants to know, the Martian or Indigo?"
A flicker of annoyance crossed his face. "That's the second time you've said that. What is a Martian?"
"Anyone who lives on Mars."
"We are Earthmen!" he shouted, livid. In a moment he relaxed and sat back. "What is Indigo?" "The blue one's name."
Now he looked interested. "My name? Indigo? That's very nice; melodious." His eyes narrowed. "You made it up? Never mind, it doesn't matter. My observations of your behavior lead me to believe you're foolish, ignorant and extremely lucky that an obvious mutation has given you long life."
The boys had tied me tightly and one arm was beginning to tingle. Daka continued to unsettle me by switching personalities. One moment he was a Martian and the next he was Indigo. His boys slowly walked around the pole where I was tied and poked me with their fingers. Frequently I succeeded in kicking one in the shins at which time he would stagger to the throne, kneel at Daka's feet and beg him to kill me.
"Silence, swine!" he yelled at them when he finally lost his patience. "Like the four-legged things of olden times, you stink up the environment. Drag yourselves elsewhere. Go away and leave me alone with the prisoner!"
They didn't obey, crept to the back of the cave where they huddled against the wall with their arms clasped about one another and quietly wept.
"They're mindless idiots, and I wish I'd never created them!" raged Daka. To me he said, "Do you know there are dozens of these dumb persons, perhaps hundreds, all existing to plague me? I can't remember how many I made. When I tell them to cease being, they cry."
"I want to go home," I said.
His eyes gleamed with new joy. "Why don't you cry, too? It's something you do all the time anyway." "What are you talking about? I never cry." "Like a leaking sky."
I tried to reach the throne with my foot but it was too far away.
"What's in the box?" he said. "I can't open it. It has no crack or seal."
"Hit it with a rock."
"It has no crack!" he shrieked. "Didn't you hear me?" "I'm hungry."
He laughed and said he hoped I starved. "I've watched you for a long time. From your beginning I knew you were an important item in my existence. How did I know that? Because I am anything but stupid."
He sent his boys to my oasis to bring back anything interesting I might have left there. When they returned that evening, three of them were full of holes.
"It was her bird, her winged beast, that foul monster with the beak like a sword," they said, weeping. "It attacked us as soon as we attempted to walk up the beach from your body. It came at us like an avenger, for no reason."
"What about Moss?" I said. "Did you see him? Does he know I'm being held prisoner?"
"Who is Moss?" said Daka, "What are you talking about?"
"My companion on the oasis. The thin one who does all the experiments."
He didn't know what I meant, didn't know Moss or anything concerning him, which made no sense because plenty of blue boys had seen Moss when they were trying to shoot me with arrows.
"Don't pay any attention to me," I said. "I made him up."
"You lie continually so I'll decide for myself what you mean by mentioning this person. What was his name? Moss?"
"Pretty soon I won't be able to talk to you or answer questions or insult you or anything at all."
"Explain," he said.
"I'm a little bit like you in that I not only like to swallow something once in a while but I absolutely must do it. In other words—"
"Yes, well, I'll allow you to eat when I'm good and ready, but if I wait too long it will be no great loss to the world. Besides, you don't actually believe you're going to leave here alive?"
"Why do you want to kill me?"
Obviously annoyed, he napped a hand and said, "How do I know? It's simply a thing I intend to do. Call it intuition, but something warns me that you're a menace."
"What have I ever done to you except get rid of a few blue boys?"
"Two hundred and seventy two, to be exact, and you prevented any of them from visiting my planet in the sky. I would have done no harm there, simply familiarized myself with the terrain."
"Sorry about that."
The holey blue boys disappeared that night and I never saw them again. Daka sat on his throne and watched me until dusk crept into the cave. Then he went out and left me strapped to the post, hungry, thirsty and getting colder by the minute.
"Emeroo," I said silently. There was no response. "Why don't you answer? Are you mad at me for not using the metal ball to surface from Indigo like Moss told me to? You have to understand that I'm independent and occasionally do something on my own, besides which I didn't have a whole lot of time in which to decide. Now that we have that item settled and done with, how about getting me out of here? I'm hungry and I have other urgent needs."
Daka the Martian comprehended physiological processes, so he returned at sunup and had his boys untie me and lead me into the woods. They were new boys, fresh and humble and unmarred. On the way back I tried running away but they tossed a net over me and dragged me to the cave where they tied me up again. I whined and complained until they secured my hands in front of me instead of behind the post.
"Where did you get the belt on your suit?" said Daka. "For that matter, where did you get the suit?"
"From Moss, the skinny person on my oasis."
"He's a figment of your imagination, but the belt is real. Think me up a better answer, please." Daka pinched my cheek and chuckled when I shrank back. "Afraid you'll lose your ugly color and turn a nice blue? Forget it." Sitting on his throne, he leaned forward and pointed a finger at me. "Your death will be painless if you tell me the truth about yourself."
"What do you want to know?"
"Are you immortal?"
"No."
"Are you five hundred years old?"
"I'm about fifteen."
"Explain," he said.
I told him about Emeroo.
"Liar," he said, his expression dark. "I'm the only powerful entity in this solar system. Maybe there is someone strong among the stars, but not here."
"You must know about Emeroo. You can't possibly not know about her."
"Silence!" he bellowed. "You're too ignorant to talk to!"
I was convinced he intended for me to starve. At dusk he and his boys left the cave and I began struggling to loose the ropes on my wrists. They were tight and I concentrated on getting my fingers on the right buttons on the belt. It was under folds of the suit and a long time went by before I managed to loosen several compressed mols of water into the air. They were so tiny in size as to be almost invisible and I only caught one with my tongue, but it freshened me enough so that I went ahead and attended to the tedious chore of freeing my hands.
The first thing I saw when I crept outside was the cage. In it was Daka. I gave a gasp of surprise and he heard me.
"I don't believe it!" he said, sitting up and placing his nose against a bar of his prison. "The legendary Reee! Are you real or a creature of the blue monster?"
"I don't understand."
Incredibly, he didn't remember anything of what had happened all that day.
"You tied me to a post, you threatened to kill me, and you left me alone to suffer from thirst."
"How could I do any of those things when I spend all my time locked up?" he said, excited. Gripping the bars, he regarded me with an anxious expression. "You're a legend and I'd never harm you. The worst I'd ever do is kidnap you and take you home to Mars."
Certain I was making a big mistake, I opened the cage which was easy enough to do from the outside. Daka leaped to the ground, grasped my hand and pumped it up and down. I took it back and examined it for signs of blue contamination. It was dirty and healthy. The box Moss had sent me after was in the cage and I grabbed it up and then Daka and I hurried toward the woods. As I crossed a path between clumps of shrubbery, I glanced into the brush and saw several blue boys on the ground. They weren't sleeping or resting like ordinary people but lay piled one on top of the other as if they had suddenly dropped in their tracks.
"We should get to a high point of ground," I said to Daka. "I have a signalling device."
"To call whom?" he said. "Surely you and I are the only people in the world."
"I have a klufe, and then there's Moss, a friend of mine, but I don't know anything about him so don't ask. The signalling device will get us rescued. If I had used it when I was supposed to, I never would have gotten into all this trouble in the first place."
"What's the box for?" "I have no idea."
He turned and ran and I followed. Sometime later we sat on top of a hill under an open sky. I had put the suit up over my torso because Daka had complained. He was getting on my nerves.
"This planet has too many odors. On Mars everything smells plain and ordinary."
"I can't figure out why you aren't under Indigo's influence."
"I think you made up that talk about my being tyrannical and hostile." "No," I said.
"Then why can't I remember any of it?" "Why are you blue?"
Tears squeezed from his eyes. "I'll go back to Mars. We have wonderful scientists who will find a cure for me." "How old are you?" "Twenty-two."
"You're so small. I estimate your weight is nowhere near my own. Incidentally, your plane won't function, or at least I doubt it will. It's covered with Indigo." While he lay and sniffled into his hands, I detached a small ball from my belt and pulled out two of the short ears. The third one was jammed and wouldn't move. So much for Moss and his artifacts.
Daka was impressed with the belt on my suit, enjoyed the food and water it supplied, complained when I stripped and recommended that I at least wear his shirt. I declined, since it was blue.
"You know, your imagination is out of control, no doubt due to the length of time you've existed in solitude. There can't be anyone named Moss on the world, particularly a genderless one, for everybody is born male or female, or both, but never neither."
"He's real, all right," I said. "The only thing that worries me is how we're going to get away from this oasis."
"My own private opinion happens to be that the original Reee died long ago. Somewhere there's a family of longhaired, slightly retarded girls who all look alike—"
"No daddies?" I said.
"Don't poke fan. There are fathers, but they never show themselves. That has to be it. You're not the girl the history books talk about."
"Now that you've solved your problem, I hope you're no longer anxious about me."
"There's a problem with my solution, though. The planet was scouted for more than a century, thoroughly sifted, if you know what I mean. The report was that only one woman and an infant were left. The woman was eventually captured but the infant disappeared. Still, history never was reliable. They might have made it all up, so we wouldn't worry about a mutant living down here."
I grew extremely bored with his talk even though I liked him being there to keep me company. Feeling tired to begin with, I lay down on the grass, closed my eyes and fell asleep. I slept the night through.
At dawn I opened my eyes and sat up at about the same moment that Daka hit me on the head with a rock.

Chapter X
I didn't like the world these days. It wasn't hot enough. Gone were the drooling clouds, steaming ground and the big red sun that used to try and burn me up. Now there were only oases, a white sky with a yellow eye, a big blue blob named Indigo, a small green blob named Emeroo, chilly caves and one schizophrenic Martian.
"Stop telling me such whopping lies!" Daka screeched. "All I want to know is how you managed to carry me all the way to that bill. If s ten miles from here."
Tied to the post, I languished in the frigid morning air. "I might as well not say anything since you haven't believed a word, so far."
The blue boys had brought back all my gear but I wasn't allowed to have any of it.
"Do you care so little for your life that you refuse to give me an honest explanation for what happened last night?"
"I've tried," I said.
"Don't you know you're the last member of a species of pestilence that has plagued this planet for ages? The place belongs to me. I conquered it. Once I was a shadow on a drop of water infinitesimal in size, but significant. I did away with moss plains, thick jungles, sod mounds, rolling white meadows, and a number of beasts so inferior they didn't know they were alive. I did away with so many humans that the remnants fled into the sky. I broke down molecules. I grew. Now I'm everywhere."
"Almost," I said. "What about the fine Martian scientists who were going to cure your human body and get rid of the blue?"
"That's a strange question! You surely don't imagine you're addressing a human. What you see before you is your eternal enemy. Stop being more stupid than usual!"
"Don't mind me, I was just thinking out loud."
One of the things that angered me was the fact that Moss hadn't done a thing to get me out of there. I had been gone all this time and still there was no sign of him.
"Emeroo," I said in my mind.
"What is it?" said Daka.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You called. What do you want?"
For some reason I began to perspire. "You're mistaken. I've merely been sagging here and doing a little quiet thinking."
"I could have sworn—oh, who cares? Shut up. This throne is a boring place to sit. I'm going out and survey some of my conquest. If you attempt to escape, fifty blue boys will be waiting outside for you and they've been given permission to beat you up."
I continued to perspire. The balance of reality appeared to be slightly out of kilter. I had called for Emeroo and Indigo answered. Had she the power?
"Are you prepared to tell me your long-life secret?" said Daka, lingering.
"I thought you had decided I was a mutant."
"There's no such thing, or not one that appears so quickly. For instance, I formed over a long period of time and through different geological periods. You popped up overnight. You can't be a mutant. On the other hand, you could be a freak."
"I'm tired and hungry, and I'd like to go home." "To what? An empty oasis?" "My klufe is there; so is Moss."
"A brainless bird and an imaginary acquaintance. Stay here willingly and I'll let you live for a while."
"So somebody else besides me is lonesome. I'm beginning to get the idea that you didn't bring me here to kill me after all. You brought me to keep you company."
Daka was so offended that he had a shrieking fit, threatened to starve me to death, leaped from his throne and stomped out of the cave. Whatever he was—a walking piece of Indigo, a half-Martian, or a combination of the two—he wasn't the most intelligent creature I had ever met. It took me the usual length of tedium to get the ropes off my wrists, and then I crept outside. It was past dusk and blue boys lay scattered about like empty sacks. "You!" said a voice.
To my astonishment, I saw Daka confined in the cage.
"Now I'm even more confused," I said.
Tears leaked down his cheeks. "So am I. What am I doing in here again? The last thing I remember is sitting on that hill with you. We were escaping. I want out of here! I want to go home!"
"I remember something from the old days when there were moss plains and stuff. Many of the plants closed at sundown, as if they were going to sleep, and then in the morning they reopened. Is that what you're like, Indigo? Are you a plant that sleeps at night?"
"Don't call me that!" cried Daka. "I'm certainly not a plant. I'm an adult male human and I don't know what in the world is going on, except that it all revolves around you."
"Answer a simple question. Do you have any memories of any daytime activities since you crashed your plane?"
Looking frightened, he clutched the cage bars and shook them. "Unlock the door and let me out."
While he whined and begged, I went back into the cave and gathered up my equipment.
"One of the blue boys will free you at dawn, I suppose," I said to him. "In the meantime, I want to get away fast. I don't like your hospitality." I fiddled with the jammed ear on the metal ball until it finally loosened, and then I extended it and sat down by the cage to wait.
I waited a long time, the entire night, to be nearly exact. The sun hadn't come up but the clearing was lighting and one or two of the blue boys were twitching when I heard the flapping of wings and Bellis flew down to park on top of the cave. I was just settling myself behind her head as Daka changed his tune and stopped pleading. The part that wasn't really himself must have awakened at that moment.
"Do you think you've escaped?" he howled. "Don't rest easy, my human friend, for I'll send an army after you! Watch for them. They'll come!"
Later I said to Moss, "I have no intention of running from blue boys for the rest of my life. Indigo craves intelligent company and nobody but me fits that description." "You want an army of your own."
"I told you to butt out of my head. It's my private property. Anything you learn from me has to come out of my mouth or you're trespassing without permission."
When I discovered he wasn't going to tell me what was in the green box, I had a fit of my own that made Daka's seem less than minor. "I think there's nothing in it anyway!" I shouted. "I think you sent me there to gain another confusing experience that could only put me closer to a breakdown. That's what you crave, isn't it? You need to destroy me, to put me down, to see me grovel!"
"When you've finished expressing yourself, I need some help with these vials, please."
I went off flying with Bellis and didn't come back till suppertime. A green boy came into my shack to serve me and surprised me so much that I fell off my chair and bruised my head. "That's more like it," I said grumpily to Moss.
"Now you know one of the reasons I wanted the box. It held a few million equations that I didn't want to memorize."
"What's he made of?"
"Chlorophyll, water, and what-not."
"Our relationship is changing. You're turning into a father, sort of. I'm pretty well satisfied with my life except for the fact that there's a vacant place somewhere in it."
"Where?"
"Didn't I just say it was somewhere? That means I can't put my finger on it."
"Be specific, exact, to the point, positive."
"Suddenly you seem agitated. What's wrong?"
He didn't answer and I returned my attention to the green boy. I had named him Lund. "You'll have to wear clothes if you wish to be civilized."
"You're wearing none," he said.
"I'm human. We people can get away with a great deal." "Why?"
"Don't give me extra problems, simply go and find yourself some pants and a shirt."
Lund was dull. His features were shaped somewhat like those of Moss, but there the resemblance ended. Lund had no sense of humor, no appreciation of the fine arts of impropriety, and if there had been nothing in the world but duty it would have been all right with him.
"Find a nice stiff pinecone and brush your hair, Reee," he said. "You look like a sunflower draped with seaweed."
"What's a sunflower?"
"And don't forget your shorts and shirt this morning. It's exceptionally chilly outside." "Beat it."
"Eat all your breakfast. You're looking gaunt." "What do I care what I look like with only you, Moss and Indigo to please?" I marched out of my shack and confronted Moss. "I'm taking Bellis and going on vacation. I intend to stay away until you get rid of that brainless piece of tree. He's boring me to death."
"He exists to provide you with diversion while I conduct my experiments. You hang around me too much. You're practically underfoot."
"That's too obviously rude. Can't you be more tactful? I'm not four years old, you know."
"What does Lund's personality lack? I'll make corrections." "Imagine someone ugly living in a place all by himself," I said. "He's never seen anybody else, ever. Then he decides to create a beautiful face."
I thought I had hurt his feelings and that made me feel cranky so when I guided Bellis aloft I gave her a swift kick in the head. She promptly changed course, turned over and tried to dump me into Indigo.
There was a war going on in Recreation that I hadn't known anything about. Instead of exploring and keeping an eye on the world, I had spent all my time interfering with Moss while he worked with his chemicals.
The first thing I noticed when I touched down on Recreation was the fact that the temperature had dropped. Instead of beloved heat I was greeted with the clammy chill that could be found on my own oasis. The second thing I noticed was a large number of corpses. Bugs and dangoes spotted a hillside. They had large wounds in their bodies, so I knew the cold hadn't killed them.
Behind the nearest hill marched an army of blue boys. They tore down nests, invaded caves, maimed and slaughtered wherever they went. Kicking Bellis in the head, I flew upside down and continued that way until we were directly above a dreeps' web. The crisscrossing fibers stretched a hundred yards in every direction. Guiding Bellis until we were a few feet above the structure, I took a vial of firewater Moss had made for me, unstoppered it and allowed a few drops to fall on the web. Then my klufe and I flew straight up and away from the flames that appeared as the fluid made contact with oxygen.
The dreeps fled their home, formed a cloud and headed for the nearest hill, which happened to be the one shielding the army of blue boys. I saw Daka at about the same time he saw me and the dreeps. He shrieked and shook his sword at the sky. He didn't seem to be alarmed by the dreeps, at least not for himself, and I soon saw why. Though blue, his body was different from his soldiers' bodies. The dreeps fell onto the army and literally consumed it in a matter of instants, and then only Daka remained, brandishing his sword and shouting threats at me. I dropped some firewater on the ground beside him and enjoyed the rapidity with which he scampered away from the flames.
While I spent time chortling and glorying in my superiority, a squadron of blue klufes zoomed from a southerly direction toward the oasis. Bellis spotted them first and responded by trying to unseat me. Now it was Daka's turn to be triumphant. He stood on the ground with his arms in the air, laughing up a storm while the blue klufes closed in. I hung onto my winged beast with a desperate grip because she was going to be absolutely necessary during the coming battle.
It didn't take Bellis long to realize I wanted strict obedience from her and she began heeding the touches of my heels as soon as they were given. In slow flight she skimmed the ground while the enemy formed a circle above and dived. The eight long legs of a mondu flicked into the air and snapped after Bellis who sped up her pace just enough to evade the grasp. At the same moment the.blue klufes were there and they all suddenly panicked and tried to follow us. One crashed to the ground while two others were snared by the mondu. It held one about the neck and the second by a leg. Had they been genuine klufes they would have been heavier and much more savage and the mondu would have had a fight on her hands. As it was, she dragged the flimsy blue birds down through the tree branches to the one on which she perched and there she dismembered what was left of them.
Bellis climbed and flew at her best speed toward a low black cloud that moved at a rapid pace and never changed shape. It was large and round and seemed to roll through the sky. The whole of it was nearly as big as my klufe.
We caught up with it as the nine birds behind us started to close on our tail. Bellis hit the cloud with her beak and the black ball became a scattered host of angry dreeps. They had left their previous scene of conquest and were on their way in search of a new home. Knocked off their symmetrical course, they attacked everything within reach.
Blinded, Bellis chose the only safe path and flew straight upward. By the time we were clear and in clean space, there were no enemy klufes left to pursue us. The dreeps once again settled into their tight ball-shape and rolled away into the distance and were lost from view.
"Reee!" shouted Daka.
I looked down and saw him toss his spear at me. Sneering, I watched the thing, expected it to reach its peak and drop. I would laugh, thumb my nose at the blue man on the ground and then I would run him off Recreation, after which I would go about my business. These things I intended to do. Instead I let out a squawk of surprise and amazement, because the spear didn't drop to the ground but continued to climb through the air as if it had a private means of propulsion.
Perhaps it had a person-seeker in it, that spear. Whatever, it came after me with nothing visible pushing it in the air, and there was nothing left for me to do but turn my klufe and run away while Daka stood below and laughed. The spear stayed well behind Bellis until she left the oasis and flew out over the body of Indigo, and then its speed increased. I turned to look at it so I would know which way to guide my klufe. It was practically upon me. Instead of zipping through me, it dipped a fraction and sped under my hands. I raised them in a hurry, which meant letting go of Bellis. At the same time she gave a piercing squeal as the blade sliced across her back. She banked too sharply and I rolled off her as if I were tumbling down a hill.
The beautiful but deadly blue expanse below seemed to open up in anticipation of my entry. Tumbling down, I caught a glimpse of an enormous shark rearing up out of Indigo with its mouth yawning wide. I landed on its tongue, sank many yards into warm, soft flesh, rose and sank again and finally settled to a stop behind a double row of giant teeth.
The contraption couldn't have been real, but I reached that brilliant deduction too long after I was first captured by it "Emeroo, this thing is a machine!" I said, after having investigated the innards of my prison.
She answered right away. "It took you long enough to discover that."
"It's because I haven't met too many fish. Where did this thing come from?"
"Your ancestors made it. . .."
A long time ago my people traveled through large bodies of water in submarines. They studied ocean floors, animal life, took pictures and carried out experiments. The Shark was one such vehicle, confiscated and preserved by Emeroo when man forsook the oceans and sea levels and climbed upward to survive. Whatever all that meant. I understood that the Shark was a machine I could guide through Indigo for a look at the hidden world.
Sitting behind the teeth, beyond which was a transparent seal, I pushed buttons on a panel and went sightseeing. I saw a finned giant swim through a patch of Indigo and hit a blank space where there was nothing but air. It started to die, thrashed about with its tail, turned belly-up and kept floundering until its nose entered another blue patch. Immediately it calmed, thrust with its tail until all of it was in safe territory and then it swam serenely until it was out of sight.
Most of the fish ignored my machine. Only the large species, like whales and vembers, seemed alarmed by my presence. The Shark had all the comforts of home except for substantial food and water. It did contain capsules that served as healthy but tasteless substitutes for the necessities. There were lights that never went off, cots for sleeping, a peculiar room with seats with round holes, boxes that provided pleasant sounds which Emeroo said were music, and there were pictures on the walls that made no sense to me. Since when had there ever been houses on Earth that looked like my old Scar, creations that reared half a mile into the sky? Since when had people sported in Indigo, splashed along her edges, enjoyed her body and remained unharmed?
Sometime  during my travels Emeroo  interrupted my thoughts. As a matter of fact I was asleep and dreaming when she called and woke me up. "Blue boy, blue boy! Go, child!" "What, what?" "You must go."
I sat up on my cot. "How can I go anywhere when I don't even know where I am?"
"Use the control panel. I will guide you."
"No, I don't think so. I'm learning a lot down here and want to continue for a while. Did you know there are mountains here that are as high as my old Scar where I used to live? Speaking of which, do you know where it is? Hey, Emeroo, aren't you talking to me anymore?"
A myriad of fish trailed past the clear view I had through the submarine's teeth. They seemed to have no problems in life except for those few times when they hit an air pocket between parts of Indigo. All sizes of creatures lived down here, all different colors, innumerable varieties, many more than lived topside. The flora was thin but was gradually accumulating and spreading as fish made their nests in it and sprayed substances noxious to Indigo.
I forgot about Emeroo and her warning of a blue boy. I really didn't care. It wasn't my problem. I appreciated the submarine and its complexities, and it was pleasant to feel safe and to sleep in a clean soft bed. Eating pills was tedious but I was already accustomed to accepting the bad along with the good.
It didn't occur to me that my vehicle was headed in a specific direction until I noticed it seldom left the bottom now but continued to skim at about the same distance from it. Also we seemed to be picking up speed. Having a desire to see some more of what lived closer to the surface, I went to the control panel and pushed some buttons.
"Emeroo," I said after a while, "these controls have stopped working. I think this heap is growing a mind of its own. Emeroo, I know you hear me! This submarine is going faster and T can't slow it down or guide it."
The body of Indigo looked different as we plowed through it. It was darker, seemed heavier and thicker and built up around the nose of the Shark. Fat waves bashed the metal sides. This continued for a few minutes and then the waves seemed to aim in the opposite direction as a corridor appeared ahead of us. The Shark was going so fast that the pressure bored an opening in the enemy.
"Emeroo, you crazy maniac!" I yelled. In mounting alarm I stared at the ever widening corridor growing before the Shark's head. "You'll kill me!" I cried. "Let me out of here!"
Whether from rage or natural law, Indigo had turned black around the craft. The only thing blue about her was the faint light at the end of the tunnel through which I plunged. I punched every button on the panel several times, changed the lighting and temperature, fumigated compartments, but didn't do a single thing to cut speed. The Shark was a juggernaut plowing through matter, and when we hit one of the many ridges that existed at this depth, I and the ship of my ancestors would fly into a million pieces.
We hit no ridges nor anything else to slow us down and after ten or fifteen minutes I grew aggravated and snarled under my breath. Maybe Emeroo was going to zip me around the world a few times to teach me an unnecessary lesson. Whatever she intended, I expected my confinement within the suicidal sub to last longer than it did. A few minutes after I lost my terror and became angry, the ship increased its speed. I didn't have time to react. A compartment above my head opened and a cloak fell over me. It was thin and transparent in the front. The part that fit along my back was convex, smooth and made of metal. The thing clamped over me before I could yell and then I watched as a panel in the sub's nose opened. A rush of wind carried me into a horizontal position and out of the ship I went, head-first, to fly along the corridor as if I had wings.
I never moved so fast in all my life and probably never would again. The suction in the tunnel pulled me forward, and as long as the corridor remained, I traveled.
Emeroo seldom made little mistakes, so I slackened speed at approximately the same time I approached the beach. Ahead of me, Indigo became more reluctant to let me through. Unaware of the fact that I was getting close to land, I bellowed my head off and tried to prepare myself for death. Just then my cloak-sled touched sand, sank into it and plowed onward, slowed considerably, shot out of Indigo into clear air, ran up the beach a few hundred yards, opened and ejected me into a puddle.
What startled me the most about the section of beach was the fact that Daka had gotten to it from where he had been in such a short length of time. It didn't occur to me that the Martians had picked him up in a pob and brought him.
All I saw was Daka when I sat up swaying and stunned from my unusual landing. He was waiting to brain me with a rock which I easily avoided since, in the daytime, he wasn't nearly as agile as a human. Leaping up and grabbing him by the hair, I hauled him toward Indigo.
"Get back where you belong," I said. "Take a long swim and don't let me see you again."
For some reason he seemed quite content and not at all upset by the way he was being handled. "Why don't you kill me?" he wanted to know.
Continuing to drag him, I said, "Because you're not a bad person at night."
"That's crazy."
"So is most everything." I didn't know the Martians had silent pobs those days, didn't know they could hide in a cloud and zoom to the ground so fast Emeroo wouldn't have time to get me away from there. At times she forgot herself, and that day was one of them.
"Danger!" she said in my head, a mite too harshly. I dropped Daka and fell down cold as morning dew. Unconscious only a few seconds, I woke up to find Martians all around me. I was in a net hanging on a crane. It raised me into the ah in preparation for lowering me into the pob.
Mars had been more a make-believe place to me than a part of genuine reality. I knew it was in the sky and that the remnant of mankind lived there, but it hadn't been real to me. Now I knew just how real it was. I was leaving Earth.
I began to scream. Someone else was screaming, too. Far away in the background of my consciousness, Emeroo howled, wept and threatened.

Chapter XI
It took about an hour of flying in clouds and then above them to reach another craft so big it seemed to fill the sky. I was enraged when they left me in the net and transferred me like a piece of baggage, but not more enraged than Daka who had a great fit when he discovered he was also a prisoner. We were confined in two large, well-lighted cells separated by transparent mesh. Halfway up his side of the mesh, Daka clung like an abused blue flower.
"They try to put clothes on me!" he mourned. "Indigo is no fool of a human. What do these pea brains take me for?"
"Try to shut up, will you? I need my beauty sleep."
"You! I should have killed you the moment you left the womb!"
"Which womb?"
"Make jokes," he said. "The homeworld falls farther behind us. I know all about space travel, as I know all about everything. Whatever power you had was attached to Earth. Now you're just an overgrown, double-jointed ox."
He disgusted me so that I nearly forgot I was scared out of my wits. Emeroo had goofed badly. I was her adopted child, yet she let them kick me out to make it on my own or go under. I could guess which it would be. What did I know besides living in a free and slovenly manner on a planet that had always seemed happy to accommodate me?
Someone came with food. Daka threw his tray at the wall but I was glad to get mine.
"In my humble opinion you had best return me to Earth or suffer some dire consequences," I said to the guard.
She seemed timid and anxious to get away from the mesh. She had shoved my plate through a small opening near the floor, and then she moved backward in a hurry.
"You talk like a person!"
"How dumb," I said. "Send someone to me who has a little intelligence. Why are you so small? You look like a midget."
"Insult me, go ahead, but I'm free and you're a prisoner."
"All I need to do is point my finger at that wall and it will disappear. You'll probably go with it."
The threat was too much for her to handle. She rushed away down the hall and exited through the door.
"This is peculiar food but it tastes all right," I said.
Daka went over to his tray and kicked it. "It's garbage. Why do they treat me like a human?"
"Don't be ignorant. I know you're Indigo but they don't. I wonder if they keep these lights on all the time?"
"Why? What difference does it make?" he said.
"Your behavior in the dark is sort of interesting."
He came over to the mesh separating us, gripped it with blue fingers, gave me a mournful grimace. "Reee. My enemy for so long that you may become my friend. Be my friend. Convince them they should release me. There's something in my personality that shrinks from restraint."
"I'm locked up, too, so don't waste your breath asking me to set you free, and don't expect me to like you. Your gut has churned up just about every friend I ever had. If you weren't using Daka's body, I'd do away with you."
Returning my attention to the food, I didn't notice how long one of his arms was becoming. Unlike what I was accustomed to eating, the things on the tray were warm and squashy. It took no effort to eat them and I soon grew bored. I dropped the last dish and then turned when I heard no expected thud. It had fallen on Daka's hand. His arm was forty feet long and still growing. He tossed aside the dish and reached for me.
A dango couldn't have climbed faster or more gracefully than I. All Indigo had to do was raise Daka's long arm and grab me on the mesh wall but she was naturally clumsy and overly deliberate. She made the hand slide across the floor and up the wall. By then I had reached the light fixture built into the center of the ceiling. Tearing away the mesh covering, I grabbed the soft flexible pipe that transmitted light, yanked on it with all my might, fell amid a showering of bright sparks and landed on my head.
"You are full of perfidy," said a soft, mournful voice.
"You even capitalize on the fact that I loathe blackness above all other things."
Groaning in pain, I writhed about on the floor and tried to stay conscious. My cell was dark and Daka's arm had been withdrawn. He crouched by the center mesh and watched me.
"Little Reee, come and let me cradle you in my arms," he crooned. "Poor orphaned child, with no mama and no papa, come to Indigo like a sweet love."
The guard came in, took one look, gasped and hurried away. She came back with three assistants who took hold of me, hauled me down the corridor and took me through the door into another part of the ship.
"Are you hostile?" said a quiet, calm voice.
"That depends on who's agitating me," I said, sitting up. I rested on a soft white cot in a white room. The woman who had spoken was dressed in white. She was small and dark with kinky black hair and a big nose. When she saw me gaping at her, she smiled.
"There are strange things done in the world of reality and I'm one of them," she said. "No, the color doesn't wash off."
I noticed that she didn't come near the cot but stayed well across the room behind her white desk. "I can't get up," I said. "You've got me strapped down."
"To make certain you rest."
"To make certain I don't get reckless and kill all of you. How stupid you are! What can I do to hurt anybody? Who says I'm the violent type, anyway?"
"My name is Carda."
"Mine is Reee. Two syllables."
Did Carda shiver? "I hope you're comfortable," she said.
"I'd feel better running from a dango or something friendly. I suppose you think I'm five hundred years old?"
This time her shiver was obvious. "I'm a psychiatrist. Do you know what that means?"
"Sure, you're a soul saver."
Again she smiled. "I'm not interested in your soul. It's your mind I want to get to know."
"Isn't that what I just said?" Disgusted and feeling tired, I lay back on the cot and looked at the ceiling. "I will appreciate it very much if you set me free before you leave for Mars. I don't belong anywhere but on Earth."
"We left orbit several hours ago. We'll be on Mars day after tomorrow."
Swiftly I sat up and stared at her. "You mustn't take me away. I have nothing against you or the others. You're my people, or at least you're distant kin, but by stealing me you run a great risk."
"Of offending Emeroo?" she said coolly. When I reacted with suprise, she explained what she meant.
Martians weren't stupid but they made mistakes because they had trial-and-error personalities. Instead of relying on their five senses or their stethoscopes and blood analyzers to tell them what I was, they hooked me up to their Stream of Consciousness recorder. SOC picked up and interpreted by reminiscings. It read my mind. Carda and her lackeys had me all figured out. I was paranoid with delusions of grandeur. I fancied myself as invincible and so ageless as to be immortal.
"I think you're mixing me up with a certain green acquaintance," I said.
I wasn't exactly an atavism, though my physique strongly resembled humans of a former day. Of course living on Earth probably had something to do with the way I was made.
"Something about that last explanation sounds so obvious as to be stupid," I said.
People on Mars hadn't changed a great deal in, say, the last five hundred years. Life on Earth had not been conducive to collecting substantial written data directly before the exodus. In fact the first Martian pioneers relied on material accumulated and preserved a thousand years prior to that day. Most of the material related to elemental science with scarcely anything in it relating to human anatomy. There was a smattering of psychology and cooking included, so the new Martians weren't completely at the mercy of a strange world.
A myriad of complex machinery had accompanied people into space. It had been built in the forgotten past and not much was understood about it. There was a Diagnostician made like a body. It was large and could accommodate anyone. A sick person was closed into the machine and a while later a tape emerged from a slot describing the patient's ailment and containing suggestions for cure. Surgery wasn't out of the question in spite' of the fact that nobody knew how to do any. The Diagnostician was but one of a host of medical machines. Often it recommended that a patient be placed in number five or number eight, or number thirty, and afterward the patient came forth from the machine with a neat incision somewhere on his anatomy.
"This is all very interesting but I want to go back to Earth," I said to Carda.
"You sound as if it's.your personal property or something. It belongs to us, you know."
"Who is us?" I said.
"Martians."
"Where does that leave me? I was born there. It's as much mine as it is yours. In fact it's more mine since I didn't run out on it."
"What is one girl? Earth belongs to Martians. We intend to return and claim her after the blue menace is rendered ineffective."
"Does Indigo know this? Have you told her how simply she's to be gotten rid of?"
"People don't talk to unintelligent life forms."
"In that ease I should end this conversation. If you want some good advice, turn off all lights anywhere around Daka."
Making as if to leave the room, Carda paused. "You talk about ignorance; the recorder picked a dilly from your mind. You're planning to get loose and somehow find your way outside the ship. You think you'll fall until you reach Earth's atmosphere and then you can whistle for your klufe to catch you before you crash. That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. Do you know what will happen if you leave this ship? You'll die within seconds and your corpse will float forever in empty space."
They fed me squashy food and recorded my brilliant thoughts on SOC. For my paranoia they gave me medicine which did nothing but make me sleepy. I wouldn't answer any more of Carda's questions when she returned, so she began to sulk.
"I remember my mother," I said suddenly, interesting her. "She was taller and more muscular than you."
"What they called an Earth lout, I suppose?"
"I don't think she was unusual. I have faint memories of other people. They were all much bigger than Martians."
Carda brooded for a while and then she said, "Your background is fantastic. How could you live alone on that world? Of course you're mistaken about being the only human down there. We haven't picked anyone up for centuries, but you're living proof that people are still there."
"Someone around here is paranoid. You don't want to believe in Emeroo or Indigo. You're happier thinking they're a figment of my imagination and a big dumb fungus. Then tell me how I know what Earth looked like half a millennium ago. You certainly dragged those descriptions out of my head. Where did they come from?"
"Legends, my dear girl. Your people passed those stories down from generation to generation."
"Sure. I don't suppose you'll tell me why I'm being taken to Mars?"
"To save your life."
"That's what I thought. And while you're saving my life you're going to pick my brains, insult me and bore me to death. Do Martians have any rights?"
"Certainly."
"Do they include me?"
She hesitated.
"Don't bother to answer," I said. "I already know." "You're different; an enigna. You may consider yourself a visitor."
"A temporary one, I hope."
I think if I had settled down, shut my mouth and cooperated with everyone, I eventually would have been accepted as a garden variety Martian. Perhaps I couldn't adjust, perhaps I was destined to be ferociously lonely except when I was on Earth. Nearly everything Martian offended me. The ship was too fancy to be anything but a product of bygone days. Certainly no Martian had made it. Big, shiny and silent, it moved through space like a bodiless arrow and no matter how I strained my senses I felt no jarrings to indicate that we were moving. When I boasted about escaping and dropping all the way home, Carda arranged for a sack to be pulled down over my head to bind my arms. Then I was accompanied by two guards down a hallway to an elevator and from there to a big window in the ship's side. One look at the blackness beyond was all I needed. The fall alone would kill me. I'd have to get home some other way.
Martians slept too much. They stayed awake about six hours and then had to sleep three or four. They didn't eat much and expected me to have the same scanty appetite. They didn't like to believe in what they couldn't see and they depended far too much on machinery they didn't understand. When I wasn't strapped on the cot in Carda's laboratory I paced the floor and complained about the straitjacket they made me wear.
"I wouldn't make you a prisoner if you came to Earth," I said to her.
"Our apologies. Actually you aren't a prisoner." "Actually what am I?"
"I haven't yet decided. You see, your blood is abnormal." "Who says so?"
"So is Daka's. Both of you are infested with alien cells. They aren't exactly the same. His are different from yours."
"That's Emeroo and Indigo," I said, "and I'm not infested. Daka is, but not me."
She kept taking small amounts of my blood, and finally she told me she had figured out a way to uninfest Daka and me. The only catch was that the process wasn't perfectly safe. She didn't describe things further, which wasn't too significant since we were about to land on Mars and I would be turned over to some other scientist.
"I live on this ship," she said. "Usually we're going back and forth all the time."
"Do you ever go anywhere but Earth?"
"There's nowhere else to go."
"So long," I said. "I expect you're glad to get rid of me, seeing as how you haven't figured me out. Maybe you should have used something on me besides psychology."
"Like what?"
"Friendship."
In the daytime I got along on Mars better than the Martians. On the other hand, night could easily have killed me. The white day sun was ugly, really nothing more than a splash of light, but it was powerful enough to bake the ground and make it an arid desert. The sky was always dotted with black clouds that blew in the vigorous wind but never dropped rain except over the sumps. They were shallow depressions filled with water that evaporated along with a chemical intended to increase vapor content. During the day rain fell continually in a heavy spray around the sumps and onto the gardens. At sundown sprinklers within and on the borders of the gardens came alive and sprayed a gas into the air. It covered the plants and protected them from the Martian night.
Because the Martians didn't really understand them, the machines often stopped functioning, and then some foreman or manager hunted in the files for the proper blueprints. In the meantime the crops died and stored provisions were brought out to the public; heating and airconditioning units in buildings stopped working and everyone who didn't own a comforting machine had to go to bed or endure heat exhaustion or freezing cold, depending upon whether it was day or night.
It was a while before I saw the sky of Mars. My guards took me straight from the ship into a long low building that was scarcely more than a corridor. Almost at every turn there was a Martian crouching or standing beside a machine with a sheet of blueprints in his hands and a pensive look on his face.
The Martians had learned. Behind me came Daka, enclosed in an opaque, skin-tight suit that opened to the world only across his eyes. No light touched any other part of his body, so Indigo remained dormant.
He kept saying, "I simply can't understand why I'm being treated like a prisoner. I demand to see a lawyer."
I wasn't wearing the straitjacket but I was clothed in shirt, pants and shoes. Hating them and scratching almost constantly, I walked between my guards and gawked at the sights, not that there were many. There were repairmen, the corridors that twisted and turned and never seemed to end, pale lights, and my group.
"I simply cannot understand why you're treating me like a prisoner," said Daka to the nearest guard, who ignored him and kept walking.
"You, there!" Daka called. "Legend! Earthgirl!"
"What?" I said over my shoulder.
"What's going on? How did they get us on the ship? What's happening?"
I didn't answer. We were taken to a long, narrow room and Daka was locked in a wire cage. As soon as the guards shut the cage door, black bulbs in the ceiling came on and chased away all the light. They left the room and locked the door behind them.
"I can see you," said Daka to me. "Why have they put me in here? This is a punishment cell. I haven't done anything! Every time I ask a question I'm told garbage!" He tore off the suit and stomped on it.
My part of the room was illuminated and I went around hunting for a way out. I had a horrible hunch that this place was going to be my home from then on, that I would be doomed to listen to Daka for the rest of my life; which only proved how inaccurate my hunches usually were. Shortly thereafter half a dozen Martians came in and politely asked for blood specimens. I cooperated since I didn't want to wear a straitjacket, but Daka became hysterical and had to be held down. The Martians left and returned an hour later and forced Daka to put the skin-tight suit back on.
The chamber they invited us to enter was small and cozy looking and cold enough to freeze the legs off a mondu. I didn't know it until I submissively walked in and started howling like an angry klufe. By then the door was shut and bolted. Daka wasn't suffering as much as I but he was changing personalities under the chamber's bright lights, and in a minute or two I had to listen to an old acquaintance complain. "
"This cannot continue!" said Indigo. "Where's the door? Where's a window? Where's a crack? I have to get out. Those confounded Martians intend to murder me!"
Trying to add some complaints of my own, I discovered my throat wouldn't work. Unbelievably, the temperature inside the chamber sank even lower. Daka's body could take it more easily than mine. Indigo raced about looking for a crevice in the walls while I slowly ceased all movement whatsoever.
"Emeroo, I think they're killing me," I said silently. "They don't mean to. They're trying to drive you out."
"Get up!" cried Indigo. She pulled my hair, punched me in the face, shoved me, but I didn't respond. I was on my knees and ready to fall flat. Never in all my years had I been that cold.
"Don't die, don't die!" cried a soft voice in my head, and then I plunged into darkness.
Someone woke me up by calling me Brown Eyes.
"In case you're blind, my eyes happen to be green," I said, sitting up.
"Not anymore."
"How did I get here?"
"You were carried in unconscious. Please accept our apologies. We didn't realize how unaccustomed you were to cold temperatures."
I recognized her. She was one of the half dozen who had collected blood specimens. The room was blessedly warm. I lay back on the bed and, while she was telling me how healthy I was, I went to sleep.
There was nothing left of the portion of Indigo that had possessed Daka's body, no more than anything remained of Emeroo within me. I felt no differently but Daka had several complaints.
"I'm a mass of bruises. Obviously I've taken a few falls. Just as obviously, everyone is telling me a lot of stuff. I've never been possessed by an alien in my life."
"Why don't you just shut up?" I said. "I've listened to you until I'm sick of the sound of your voice."
He didn't look offended. "Don't blame me for your troubles. It isn't my fault that you have brown eyes, and if you want my opinion they never were green. The color was an illusion created by the ghastly shades on that ghastly planet."
"Are my eyes really brown?"
"Listen to me. In your case they definitely made an error. You weren't possessed by anything but an uncivilized nature. I intend to change that."
"Go away," I said.
"Be reasonable. You've seen the girls on Mars. I've chosen you."
"For what?"
"The mother of my children."
"I think Emeroo preserved me for other than you."
Returning to the scene of the exorcism, I hunted up the woman who had supervised my convalescence.
"You watched through a glass window," I said. "Surely you saw something in the chamber."
"All I saw was you on the floor. The infestations were microbes, and you couldn't expect them to be seen."
"What about Daka? Didn't you see Indigo come out of him?"
The woman laughed. "You mean did I see a blue ghost come forth, perhaps shrieking and cursing?"
"I can't figure out why everyone thinks it's so funny. You might have hurt a pal of mine."
"Whatever it was, it's dead. The cold killed it."

Chapter XII
I wandered through skinny buildings past skinny people, waiting for someone to arrest and confine me. It seemed they weren't going to do it. Apparently I was free. They didn't care what I did as long as my eyes were brown. It would have been pleasant to get rid of Daka, for he had grown overly familiar and obnoxious, but I needed him to show me where to find food and shelter, besides which he wouldn't have left me anyway, clung like a shadow and deluged me with offensive compliments.
"We have to eat in a cannery because a gasser broke down and half the gardens in the sector died," he said.
The cannery was almost as hot as Earth. Martians came in, ate hurriedly and seemingly in great discomfort, and then hurried out again. As usual, the building was long, low and narrow,, Big pots on big stoves boiled and spattered and filled the air with steam. We stood in a line that moved slowly to a serving table where six people ladled food into bowls.
"That isn't enough," I said, looking into my bowl.
"Next," said the man.
"As a living legend I should think someone would be interested in my history," I said, after Daka and I sat down at a long table.
"You mean a scholar? They're all on the ships that travel back and forth to Earth. We can't afford to have anyone doing anything that isn't related to growing or processing food."
"I don't know anything about food other than eating it. Maybe I'll be put on a ship."
"Forget it. We're careless about many things but diligent about what is left. The travel port is impossible to infiltrate illegally. Everyone on Mars knows about you and can recognize you on sight. Relax and let yourself be absorbed into the culture."
"The place sounds like a giant Indigo. I think I should tell you I have no intention of being absorbed into anything."
He discouraged me from choosing a spot in one of the hallways as my sleeping quarters. It seemed the heat was turned down every evening, and the temperature dropped to thirty-five degrees. He described that as being sufficient to very nearly kill me with cold.
We walked down innumerable hallways to a barracks full of beds, bureaus and closets. On one side of me slept a woman with a small girl, on the other side was a young boy.
I worked in the cannery, it being the warmest place available. The cooks might have been curious about me but they had little time to ask questions. If the food from the remaining gardens wasn't processed right away it would spoil, and if that happened the Martians didn't eat. They couldn't borrow from another sector. Either they made it on their own or they failed alone.
"We're all going back to Earth soon," one skinny cook said to me. "It's being prepared for us. Already there are many places that are habitable. There are vacation resorts, parks and all sorts of wonders."
"Your conversation will make more sense if you keep in mind that I'm just in from Earth."
"Personally I believe you come from this very planet. They can't convince me you're an Earther. You're a true Martian, which means you know nothing of the other world."
"If I'm a Martian, I seem to be an unusual one, don't you think?"
"Shift that pot aside and start peeling those vegetables."
The woman who bunked next to me in the barracks was equally knowledgeable about Earth. "Did you know there are rows of fruit trees that stretch farther than the eye can see?"
"Have you ever been there?" I said.
"No, but I've seen pictures."
"I've been there and it's nothing but desert."
"I know all about you. You're Reee, the Earthchild. Nobody can understand anything you say because you're not human, but I know Earth isn't a desert and it hasn't had any deserts for a thousand years."
No one wanted any information whatsoever from me about the planet of their origin. They had their outdated photographs and their ignorant friends, they had their imagination and a considerable number of worthless hopes, plus they had a big prejudice against me.
A teacher came into the cannery twice a week and taught us language and math while we worked. She didn't like the way I pronounced my words, which seemed fair to me since I didn't like anything at all about her.
"You persist in trying to retain your image as an alien," she said.
"I can't help what you think of me." "Don't you have that askew?" "Who do you think I am?" I said.
"A publicity stunt. I happen to know for a fact that we have people everywhere whose duty it is to see that morale doesn't sag. Living on this planet isn't easy. In fact, every so often someone takes off into the desert without a personal comforter. Our morale officers try to discourage that sort of behavior."
When I'd had enough of waiting for something inspirational to happen to me, I found an exit in one of the long hallways and let myself out onto Mars.
"You simply don't listen," said Daka, coming out after me. "How many times do I have to tell you the outside isn't habitable without a comforter."
"Seems to me we're both out here and we aren't dead."
Perspiration popped out on his face and he shaded his eyes with his hands. "Hurry back inside. It's intolerable."
"That's because it was too cool inside. Now you have to do a little adjusting."
"I don't intend to die with you. Come back inside. There's nothing out here but desert. There's no water, and you'll freeze when the sun goes down."
He went in and I walked away. Seen from a distance, the colony looked like a cluster of cubes on a gray plate. Right away I discovered I wasn't going to get all the air I wanted. It was uncanny, what with all that clear space about me, but there seemed to be a tight pincer high on my nose that squeezed each time I inhaled. I definitely didn't care for the round white sun, nor did I like the dingy sky. As for the ground, it looked more like ash than soil.
Grief assailed me and I started to whimper. It was an ugly and threatening world, and I wanted to go home. On Mars I was cut off from all that was familiar, and though I hadn't exactly been swamped with friends, there had been Moss and Lund and even Indigo, not to mention the green one who had preserved me through time and circumstance.
It was hot and I had to walk slowly in order not to suffocate. There were mountains far ahead while to my right was a garden complex, the greenery of which lured me. It comprised many acres, and I stood at its border and marveled at the fall of rain in just the one area. Directly overhead was a black cloud that emptied, drifted away and was replaced by a gray specimen that swiftly darkened. The spray was warm and so were the green leaves which I picked and tried to eat. They were covered with a bitter powder. I supposed it was removed from the food before it was prepared for consumption.
Hunger drove me back to the city. Somehow I would have to find more to eat if I expected to return to Earth in one piece. Daka was waiting for me in the barracks.
"I've been trying to persuade this woman to trade bunks with me. You need someone to look after you."
My next bunk neighbor's name was Tata, and she seldom displayed patience with anyone but her daughter. "I don't trade anything," she said. "Too many times I've ended up with less than I had."
A short, slender man with a shock of dark hair hurried up to us. "Trouble?" he said to Tata.
"Nothing at all."
"Where's the baby? I'll take her for a walk."
The baby was found three bunks down, rummaging in someone's bureau. She went away with her father and I threw myself on my bed to have a long think about food.
"It wouldn't hurt or inconvenience you to trade bunks with me," Daka said, pursuing his conversation with Tata.
"Reee obviously isn't interested in you, so why don't you forget it? Also, aren't you overlooking the fact that she's a little young for you? She's big but she's only a child. I think it would be a good idea for you to go after someone your own age."
Mars hadn't been ready for people when Indigo chased Earth's populace into the sky. The planet was empty and desolate and could have benefited from some leisurely seeding. For a long time man lived inside protected metal buildings and ate dehydrated food while machines went abroad releasing chemicals into the atmosphere. Tons of fungi and bacteria were scattered on the ground, along with slow-dispersing cubes of hydrogen and oxygen. The manufacturing of carbon dioxide was a major function of the factories. This was dumped haphazardly from space craft.
Life was so tenuous that crime on Mars couldn't be tolerated. Since aberrant behavior was cause for punishment, creativity remained at a minimum. The sectors had their own governments, with very few people acting in a judiciary capacity. It became not only practical but a necessity for citizens to police themselves and their close associates. While a felony was a rarity, so also were the arts and sciences not usually in evidence.
I learned the above facts, plus various and sundry others, in the library which was in a small room in one of the dozens of tributaries of the main corridor of our sector. I found it by accident and because I was nosy. The door knob was rusted, the metal frame was warped, and the corners of the hallway nearby were full of webs and dark shadows. It was plainly a place in which Martians had no interest and was therefore full of fascination for me. Instead of reporting to work in the cannery, I returned to the door and spent that morning forcing it open.
I had the feeling the room was older-than the building, that the shelves and stacks of film had been there during the birth of the planet. There wasn't too much dust, just the smell of age and the deep impressions objects had made in the wood and metal under them.
Probably the library had been the creation of some optimist who thought people would have time for something besides struggling to stay alive. The room contained all the history a Martian could wish for. Since I was illiterate, I had to begin with basics, but it took me several days to discover where they were. In the meantime, I had a personal problem. They weren't feeding me enough in the cannery and I was losing weight. My solution was to join the food line every two hours. The servers were so bored and exhausted that they seldom looked beyond the bowls, so I succeeded in getting several meals on that first day before any of them noticed me. Then I was criticized for skipping work, but the hungry lines, always anxious to have full bowls, prevented them from doing more than that.
Early the next morning Daka appeared beside my bed and ordered me to go straight to the cannery. The morning after that, he did the same thing. On the third morning he said he would accompany me to work, since I had been blatantly disobeying him, but as soon as he left the cannery, so did I.
"We can't spare a guard for everybody who wants to loaf," he said at dinner that evening.
"I expect I'm the only one who isn't on the job, but I'm not loafing."
"Then what are you doing?"
"Trying to live in this unpleasant place."
He looked annoyed. "At least you won't lose any more weight. Everyone knows you're always in the food line. I mean, that's a stupid way to live."
"Why doesn't someone change the rules and tell the servers to give me three big meals a day?"
They couldn't change the rules, primarily because the only person who had any authority was the mayor, and she was a machinery repair technician who couldn't be spared except for dire emergencies. She would have to call a meeting of the directors, which meant pulling so many people off the job that the sector would have had to close down.
"You aren't contributing anything to the sector," said Daka.
"That's too bad."
"You must understand our philosophy." "I do."
"Well?" he said.
"I'm not going to work in the cannery anymore. I don't intend contributing one thing. This isn't my world and I didn't ask to come here. Any time you don't like what I'm doing, take me to Earth."
"You don't understand us at all."
"I do. No one is going to do anything to me for not following the rules. You people have no freedom or imagination. You say you're concerned with each other but a better word is 'indifferent.'"
I once walked to the space station, or very nearly. The guards stopped me before I got into the terminal, which happened to be the one really large building in the sector. The Martians knew all about aggression, so the guards were armed with hand guns. It seemed that not just Earth girls were anxious to leave. Practically everyone in the place had considered the idea of escaping at least once. The guards were loyal Martians, unfriendly, acquainted with my photograph and in no mood for conversation. They simply kept me at bay in the final part of the corridor and let me eat my heart out as I watched the ships and equipment in the big room beyond.
Tata had some advice for me. "Toe the line. If you annoy enough people, they'll pretend you don't exist. It's called the silent treatment. They'll go so far as to let you starve."
"Why won't they let me go home?"
"If you're referring to Earth, it's too dangerous an environment for a young girl."
"This sort of conversation makes me lie awake at night staring at the ceiling."
"It could be your sleeping habits," she said. "One nine-hour sleep a day is unhealthy."
"So is Martian philosophy."
I tutored my mind in the library and stuffed my stomach in the food line.
"Keep it up," said Tata. "I've seen what happened to people who refused to obey the law."
Daka showed concern. "If we marry right away, I think the talk will stop."
"Which talk?"
"That you're incorrigible. I've told you a hundred times, you can't force us to take you away."
"I believe it. You're all like one big immovable machine."
I finally found the basics in the library and learned how to read. At first, when I began examining the most easily accessible films, I thought I had wasted my time, because they were concerned only with Mars, but then I found some older material about my homeland.
There was a great deal of information about Indigo; my old friend. Well, at least she was more closely related to me than the Martians. She loved Earth and so did I, she wanted freedom and I did too, she was a malignant fungus while I also ate everything I could get my teeth on. We had much in common.
Once upon a time Earth was mostly flatland with oceans and mountains. The garbage of man gradually formed thick crusts on the surface and humanity moved onto the top. S6me of this information wasn't new to me, but it was still endlessly fascinating. It would even have been better if I had been able to find a history of Emeroo. Later I began to wonder if I would ever find so much as the mention of her name.
Surely her existence was known to those old Earthmen who became the first Martians. My green friend had never been particularly gregarious, but neither had she gone out of her way to remain hidden. The point I overlooked was the fact that while Indigo was all over Earth, Emeroo was quite small and therefore not at all obvious.
The library and its information had been lost to the Martians for a long time. Two centuries was my guess. That long ago they had been using fire and acid against Indigo, and the recommendation on a certain spool on a back shelf was that those two weapons should be used once or twice and then they should make way for several different types of isotopes.
"Are they still trying to burn up Indigo?" I said to Daka.
"I haven't been back since we came up together, but I imagine so. We don't change much, you know."
"Have they always used fire and acid?"
"As far as I know."
It was evening and we were eating dinner in the cannery. For the first time since we left Earth, he succeeded in startling and fascinating me. "The rumor is going around that an alien stowed away on a flight."
I didn't exactly fall off the bench. "Who? What? Where? When?"
"Don't get excited. It's none of your business."
"You never told me you had a lot of sadism in you. I learned it all by myself, just being around you."
"All I know is that he came in on a ship and is going to be decompressed."
Poor Lund. He tried to smile at me through the glass partition in the chamber. Right then I loved him and regretted every moment I had spent tormenting him. I took back every insult I had paid him.
"You can't kill him!" I said to the technician.
"He's the weirdest I've ever seen, and I don't know why I'm giving him a gender since he's neither one nor the other. Besides that, he's all green, and isn't he hideous as far as facial features are concerned? Look, girl, rules are rules and we only let you in here because you're unique. You think we enjoy routine all that much? Just keep your distance or get tossed out on your head."
"He's alive and he's my friend! Don't do it. Let me talk to him. You're all sadists! You knew I'd come to watch, didn't you? You waited for me!"
"I apologize," she said. "But the routine, you see. It gets pretty deadly."
"This is like an execution!" "Possibly."
Lund was as green as the grass of my famous birthplace and I shed bitter tears all over the viewer's window. "Don't cry, honey," he called to me. "You're as good as home."
"You never had a sense of humor before," I said. "This is no time to try and cultivate one."
"They're pretty good at searching their ships. I'll have to remember that."
"Oh, you stupid weed, they're going to kill you!"
"I've never seen such cannibals," he said, making a face. "Hard times haven't brought out the best in them."
"What are you talking about? They're going to squeeze Emeroo out of you. What'11 be left, just tell me that?"
"It's a good thing they've at least taken half-good care of you. You're skinny as a stick and you look miserable."
"Oh, I'm so unhappy!" I blubbered. "Oh, Lund, I'm sorry I was so mean to you!"
Grinning all the while, that rotten technician pulled a lever and Lund reacted as if something had hit him in the stomach. "Ooff!" he said, his little features pinching into a frown.
It wasn't half so bad right then, since only the heaviest air had been withdrawn. As the thinner residue streamed out of the chamber with swift pumps, Lund tried to complain. There was nothing with which he could make sound. His cries were silent. He bent over so that I couldn't see his face, but I was certain he was in agony. The pumps kept working, his body went through a series of contortions and then, just before he popped, he lifted his head and gave me a little wink. A moment later he seemed to explode, and there wasn't a single atom left of him.

Chapter XIII
Nothing seemed quite the same after Lund's death, not that I had ever really been fond of him, but he was a living link with home and hadn't deserved his end. I began having a good many problems that I hadn't had before. Someone kept tearing up my bed. I would come back to the barracks and find the sheets pulled off and the tick ripped open. The Martians didn't believe in attractive clothes so it wasn't a disappointment to me to find the few rags in my bureau torn apart. The one thing that botthered me was when they began giving me short shrift in the cannery.
"I warned you," said Daka, his expression resigned. "Recant, and they'll all forgive you."
"I don't know what that means."
"Declare publicly that you think Earth is a poor relation, a backwoods island."
Tata had different advice. "It isn't Earth that annoys people," she said. "It's the fact that you aren't doing any work."
"Who's ruining my bed and my clothes?"
"I am. I have to. I'm your closest associate and if I don't go along with the will of the majority they'll give me the same treatment and maybe worse."
Daka informed me that he was going back to his old job with the space program. He was returning to Earth to fight Indigo.
"I thought you were so keen on our getting married." "It wouldn't work."
"Particularly since I'm going to be starved to death by your friends, right? Why don't you do your conscience a favor and help smuggle me aboard your ship? You could drop me off at the nearest pool of Indigo."
"It wouldn't work."
"I'm impressed with the way you fight for your beliefs. I'm impressed with all the Martians. They deserve a great deal more than they're getting."
I continued to show up in the line at the cannery, but everyone was on the lookout for me. The servers refused to place anything in my bowl and the people behind kept shoving me until I moved on.
A personal comforter was a flimsy suit with a transparent headcovering, and when a Martian wore one, she could go outside at any time of day or night and remain there for approximately twenty-four hours. Unfortunately, all the comforters were too small for me. I went outside without any artificial aids, walked to the nearest garden, picked an armful of carrots and potatoes and took them back inside to the library. Since they grew on top of the ground, they were covered with the gray powder. Carefully I peeled them and ate them raw. They tasted fine.
There was no point in my returning to the barracks. I set up housekeeping in the library, made a bed of empty film boxes, found it every bit as comfortable as the so-called civilized one I had been using.
Water wasn't exactly a natural phenomenon, since even rain was artificially produced, so the supply was used sparingly by the inhabitants. The sector contained twenty shower stalls that functioned for thirty minutes during each of the four daily work shifts. The stalls were just off the main corridor, scattered over a ten-mile area. At one time they had curtains around them, but children destroyed the curtains, so bathers never had any privacy. That part I didn't care about, but I always used showers well away from the library, and every day I took a bottle of water for drinking purposes. There were no sewers on Mars, only a series of aboveground pipes that emptied into one of the deep abysses scarring the plant.
I didn't see Daka for a few days, so I walked to the space terminal. The guards wouldn't answer any of my questions, just aimed their guns at me and watched with their little dark eyes until I finally grew weary and left.
Tata couldn't tell me who or where the mayor was. She had never seen her. I tried the oldest person in the barracks, a woman of about fifty-four years. She told me that her father had once pointed out the mayor to her in cubicle sixteen.
That was a section of the main corridor with which I was familiar, so I went away to hunt for the lady.
I found her but she was ankle deep in the broken parts of a heating machine and wouldn't come away. Like most of her kind, she was small, underfed and unacquainted with humor.
"But I'm being ostracized," I said. "Don't you care?"
A wrench in her hand, she attacked a bolt on the heater. "What good would it do if I did? I don't believe you understand what it means to be a mayor."
"Explain it to me."
"If disaster strikes more than one sector, the mayors meet, discuss the problem and come up with a solution. I'm an ambassador more than anything else."
"What about your sector?"
"Governing, you mean? You've been here long enough to know the people govern themselves. Those who step out of line are handled by the majority."
The next time I went out to the garden, a blue nozzle popped up out of a metal sprayer and dumped gas a few yards behind me. It dumped a second quantity nearer to me, and I knew I was being fired upon. No doubt the gas was unhealthy, but I was hungry, and instead of retreating I ran swiftly between the vegetable rows, grabbing food as I went.
The skin on my hands and the soles of my feet came off when I washed them in the library. Raw, sore and disgruntled, I ate my lunch too quickly and got indigestion. I obtained some grease for my wounds from one of the machines in the corridor. That made them feel worse.
Tata eventually refused to talk to me.
"A fine friend you are," I said. "How would you like to be in my feet? This is all happening because I don't belong here. I'm not a Martian and this isn't my world. I'll tell you something about yourself. You're driven by something besides the will to survive. Call it cruel nature, hate or whatever, but no matter what I say or do, no one forgives me. I've relented in part, haven't I? I don't want to starve so I've agreed to work, but I'm not permitted to. Your people aim to see me dead."
Hoping someone in the cannery might have grown a heart, I tried to get some dinner. It was no good. The people in the line simply refused to make room for me. They were behaving as if I weren't there. If they kept it up, I wouldn't be.
After raiding the garden the next afternoon, I found the door locked when I tried to get back inside. There was just the one big partition that slid up whenever pressure was applied to a small colored panel on the building. The door refused to go up, which meant someone inside had dropped the bar across their side. Ten miles away was the other end of the building and the space terminal. I would suffocate in the thin air unless I moved extremely slowly, but there was no time for that. Sundown was due in three or four hours. There were no windows in my side of the sector and it would take me too long to reach the other side; not that anyone would let me in, anyhow.
"Emeroo, you didn't take very good care of me," I said, knowing full well that millions of miles separated us. "Why didn't you let me die when I got lost from my mother in the beginning? Now I'm going to freeze to death. It sounds painful. I'm not going to like it."
I made it easy for them, passed out right in front of the door, so that when they discovered a big need to find me alive, they didn't have to do much hunting. I never knew cold was a living thing traveling on speedy wings. The sun was a splotch of blinding white, filling the whole sky one moment and trying to roast me like a piece of meat in a fire, and then it fell off the edge of the world with no warning. Perhaps it didn't fall, at that. It might have been shoved off by the cold. All at once the sky was black, the stars were huge and flickering, and I was standing like a stick and feeling my blood congeal.
"Looks like a jar of Emeroo," I said, later. "Why don't you stick me in SOC, if you think you'll get any answers that way?"
Tata answered. "Most of us don't believe at all in psychology."
"What did I ever do to make you hate me?" "You never did anything, that I can recall, but you're the enemy." "How so?"
"Shut up that kind of talk or we'll throw you back outside. Just tell us about this jar. It used to be canned beans, and we need it and the other jars in order to survive."
"Are they all like this one?"
She leaned over the bunk in the barracks where I lay, and I got a good look at her eyes, narrow and mean and empty of anything but self-concern. "Did you ever hear of prevention? We know what spoilage is, and the beans in this jar didn't spoil. The green material is alive."
"Take it outside and throw it in one of the abysses," I said. "I can't answer any more questions. I can't even talk. I haven't had enough to eat lately. I believe I've dropped fifty or sixty pounds."
Her husband and another man went away and brought back several bowls of food which I promptly devoured.
"Would you please let me go to the bathroom before we talk some more?" I said. "I'm not in very good shape, weak is the word, and I have no self-control."
They let me go because they believed the lure of the food bowls was powerful, and indeed it was, but not so much that I would choose to die for it. I went straight down the corridor, took my familiar tributary to the right and got lost in little hallways that hadn't been walked in by Martians for centuries. I would rather have lived than eat. Tata and her friends wouldn't believe I didn't know anything about the green matter in the jar. After a while they would begin to torture me, and since Martians were naturally sadistic, the torture would progress to entertainment for them.
Half an hour later I was back on my bunk with them bending over me.
"Do you think we don't know everything you do?" said Tata.
"You knew about the library?" "Everyone did."
"Why hasn't anybody gone there?" "Because we aren't interested in what's in it." "But it's your history, the story of your background and—"
"You're talking about the wrong subject, Earth girl! The green matter!"
"Oh, well, open the jar and let's see what happens."
"What happens is that it goes sliding everywhere!" she said.
By then I knew they had more of a problem than just the one jar. "Go around gathering it all up in containers."
"We tried that. It's like mercury, not easy to pick up. All you have to do is quit stalling and tell us what it is and how to get rid of it."
They finally threw me back outside, not that it did them any good because it was still daylight and well before nightfall somebody opened the door. I couldn't see a single soul when I ran into the chamber, but that was all right with me as I didn't care who had saved me. Right away I went to the library. There was really no other place for me to go. Someone had brought me a large bowl of food. Tata? I hardly thought so, but even that didn't matter. For the first time in a long time, I fell peacefully asleep with a full stomach.
A few days later I saw the mayor on her way to the next sector for a meeting with all the sector leaders. She went in a two-seated, four-wheeled vehicle. Before she arrived at her destination, she was met on the desert by an armed delegation that sent her back where she came from. That other sector, it seemed, had their hands full with a strange problem and didn't want the situation aggravated by having foreigners in the confines.
"It's your duty to help us," said Tata. She hadn't knocked on the library door or asked permission to enter, simply kicked her way in and proceeded to be belligerent.
"I agree, since you and your kind are human. I just don't know what I can do."
"The green matter came from Earth."
"I'm not responsible for every—"
"Stop playing games!" she yelled. "Your food isn't being contaminated and your water is clean! I took a green shower yesterday. We don't expect you to get rid of it for us, but you can tell us how to do it."
"I don't know anything about science."
She looked as if she were going to hit me and then thought better of it, which was just as well, considering that I was getting a little cranky at being blamed for everything.
"Look, you're just a dumb child," she said. "Consider my position. Think of all of us. There are thousands of your people trying to survive up here."
"I'm one of you now?"
She obviously wanted to say yes. I could see the effort she was making. "Not with those eyes!" she burst out, and then she ran from the room.
Some people I didn't know came by later in the day to throw me out onto the desert. It wasn't personal, they said, merely a type of exorcism. If the possessed went away, the possessor might do likewise.
I tried not to think about nightfall, lay down on the ground and enjoyed the sunshine, but shortly my stomach began to growl and I grew miserable.
"Hi!" said a cheerful voice.
Believing I was hearing things, I didn't even bother to raise my head. There was no one within miles of the place who would hail me in such a friendly fashion. In fact, one might search this entire sector of the galaxy and find only a couple of entities who cared to call me friend.
The sun burned my skin. It felt fine. Since I wasn't so ignorant anymore, thanks to the library, I knew about cosmic rays and about how I shouldn't stay exposed too long on the Martian surface. There didn't seem to be much I could do about it so I remained stretched out and continued to enjoy it.
"Can't you say hello?"
That was when I raised up and saw a familiar figure coming toward me from the direction of the sector exit. His ugliness was perfection itself at that moment.
"You're just a figment of my imagination," I said. Moss kept coming and I started leaking water from the eyes. "You left me here all this time, all by myself. What did you care what happened to me?"
He stood over me and looked down his ridiculous nose. His eyes crossed and uncrossed. "If that's the way you feel about it, I'll take this bowl of food and chuck it in the nearest ravine."
"I don't care if you aren't anybody to speak of," I said, gripping him by the legs. "I love you."
"Yes, hmmm, well, I told you a long time ago that you couldn't do that. There are boys and girls, you know, and I'm neither."
"Who cares?"
"So speaks the voice of infants and innocents. Eat your dinner."
Obeying with gusto, I said, "What kept you so long?"
His eyebrows went up. "I thought my appearance would be a big surprise?"
"Not since I learned today that my eyes are green again. Besides, Lund carried the message."
"Which you didn't believe. You were absolutely convinced he was dead."
"I know Emeroo can't die. I know you're all just part of her."
"You don't really know it," he said, his tone kindly. "You think you know it, but that's all. Would you like to see Lund again?"
"No, he's dead."
"You see?"
"How's Bellis?" I said.
"Developing extremely hostile mannerisms. I decided to do her a favor and ride her one day because all she did was sail around shrieking with grief. She attempted to dismember me against a tree."
Eating and blubbering, but mostly eating, I grieved over thoughts of my poor, lonely bird.
"Take my advice?" said Moss, and I shrugged. "You don't need the Martians for anything. Remain outside. I'll be your personal comforter."
"Why don't you leave them alone? They've suffered enough."
"I forbid you to advise me where they're concerned. I'll disappear if you do. You'll see nothing but green blobs that never speak."
"Why do you have to hurt them anymore?"
"This very minute they're preparing to kill you. You have no understanding."
"You haven't answered my question!" I said.
"About that personal comforter—"
"Not you," I said. "I mean, not your shape, I mean—"
He knew what I meant. He walked back to the building, and I saw him go through a shrinking process. He changed his shape, entered through the crack under the panel. After an initial hesitation, he quickly flowed from sight and was gone. A few minutes later, while I was engrossed in licking my bowl, a green ball came rolling toward me.
"This is insanity," I said. "I know there isn't a bit of difference between you and him and Lund and all the stuff in the sector, but seeing you is like seeing another old friend. Hello, Emeroo."
In a manner of speaking, she took me under her wing.
When the rain turned green, the Martians knew they would have to find another place to live. The answer wasn't as easy as simply abandoning the sector and moving in with their neighbors across the desert. That sector was also being destroyed by Emeroo. She was everywhere that the Martians were.
Tata shivered as she looked at me; actually she looked at my personal comforter, a strange one by any standards. "All the legends are true. You're not human."
We were in the library. I had returned, in spite of Emeroo's objections, to do some reading. "Yes, I am," I said.
"You're a green monster!" she cried. "Wait, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say that. Please help us."
"I can't, but the reason would take too long to explain."
"You say all this material is alive, but we can't kill it. We can't even damage it, not even in the decompression chamber. We can't understand that. When you first arrived here, we drove out those alien particles in you, and we did it in that chamber."
"You won't like it if I say she has a sense of humor."
Again Tata shivered. "As if it's a person and a friend. I remember you when you weren't green. Just a child, you were. Tell us what to do."
"It won't do any good. You'll do just what she wants, and I don't know what that is. She never tells me anything."
About fifty of them came to carry me outside. "If you aren't with us, you're against us," said Tata.
"Why don't you stop wasting time with me and take care of yourselves?"
They had to convince themselves that I was beyond their vengeance. Each one of them wore a comforter, so they weren't worried about time. First they threw me into the garden while it was raining. Next they tied me and turned a gas nozzle full on me. They tried stabbing and bludgeoning me. As a personal comforter, Emeroo was far better than the suits they wore. Nothing could penetrate my green outer layer. After hours had passed and they were exhausted and ready to give up, they left me tied to a post and made as if to go back into the sector. The door wouldn't open. It seemed that the mechanism inside was jammed with a tough green substance.
Tata came over to me. "You aren't interested in helping us."
"What are you, a split personality? You and they have tried to kill me two dozen ways. If I could, I'd spit in your eye."
"We'll die out here. Our suits are good for only a few more hours. By then it will be dark."
"You shouldn't have been so fiendishly dedicated to your work." Looking at no one in particular, I yelled, "Emeroo, you'd better not kill them! They're fools, I admit, but you have to show them some mercy."
She didn't show them anything until practically the last moment. I freed myself from the post and stood uneasily in the midst of all those expiring bodies until I couldn't bear it any longer. Going over to the sector door, I started kicking and pounding it. Tata and her friends would freeze to death in two or three minutes.
At exactly sixty seconds from doom, the door moved under my hand. It went up, and I had the duty of hauling bodies inside.
Tata didn't thank me. Nobody did. In a way I couldn't blame them.

Chapter XIV
Emeroo had blocked the garden exit. The entire cubicle at the end of the building was a solid mass of green that refused to budge or withdraw an inch "Be reasonable," I said to Tata. "Try and use your heads."
"What does it feel like, having such a monster for your guardian and avenger?"
"She's all I've ever known. Sometimes I think she's the only reality and everything else is made up."
Tata shivered. She was always shivering when I was around. "I'm trying to remember you're human, but it isn't easy when you talk that way. I'm terribly sorry about what happened. We were frightened. We didn't mean to hurt you."
"You would have torn me apart, if you could, and then been sorry later. That's the way people are, and you expect me to say it's all right. Maybe I will, but supposing there's someone else who won't?"
"Talk to it. Her. Tell her we're harmless."
"Get it out of your mind that there's something she doesn't know. If there is one subject she's expert in, it's human beings."
Quick access to the garden had been cut off but there were vehicles that made the ten-mile journey from the space station exit, besides which the cannery personnel discovered that Emeroo had withdrawn from the processed foods. Microscopic examination of random samples revealed no contamination, but several citizens were selected as a double check and were ordered to eat the canned articles for an entire day. They did and suffered no ill effects.
I spent most of my time in the library, in spite of Emeroo's criticism. "You want me all to yourself," I said, by way of complaint.
"" I don't want you at all. You're petulant, irrational, ungrateful, unintelligent, uneducated—"
Burying my nose in a film viewer, I ignored the voice in my head, and eventually it went away. My body felt no effects from being totally enveloped in green. I didn't feel any differently to the touch, but I was as green as Moss who accompanied me practically everywhere I went.
"Excuse me for picking up that thought," he said, "but you're the one who's following me."
"You have nowhere to go."
"Speak for yourself, love."
My mirror showed me a green Reee. I even had green hair. Everything about me was the shade of old Earth. The added weight wasn't sufficient to tire me, even when I ran, which I often did because the children chased me. They weren't as timid as adults.
I think the Martians' reasoning paralleled my own in that they expected to be chastised and even terrorized by the green alien for a while after which it would go back to Earth and take its pet human with it. They changed their minds when little bits of green began showing up in the gardens. The rain had been normal for a long time, the crops were growing nicely, and everyone anticipated a better turn of events. Then one or two gas jets jammed and the technician found wads of green material in the operating mechanisms. The mayors of all the sectors met in our building. The situation in all the cities was identical, with the cannery food clear and edible, the garden exits cut off, and green matter showing up in a few gas jets.
"I like the way your nose is so straight," I said to Moss.
He sighed and looked over my head. "Do engross yourself in study. It won't hurt your brain an iota if you learn a little history, geography, mathematics—"
"You look good in Mars clothes."
"This suit is the latest Moricci creation."
"What?"
"Twenty-first century designer. Never mind." "Maybe if you ate a little more, you could fill out and be a bit muscular."
A tired smile on his face, he said, "Are you trying to make me human? Again? I don't eat people food except for fun, remember?"
"You're just as much a person as I ami" I said, too loudly.
I began to whine. "I'm tired. I ache all over. Do you mind if I sit on your lap and rest for just a few moments?"
"Yes, I do mind. You wriggle constantly and you don't know the meaning of silence."
"Isn't there anything about me that you like?" I said.
He scratched his head and looked thoughtful, and I got mad and went away.
The Martians were losing what calm they possessed. Moss always walked into the cannery and out again with my meal on a tray, and no one ever bothered him. In fact, all activity ceased until he was out of sight. One day a dozen people jumped him and dragged him away to the pressure chamber. They were convinced he was the heart and soul of the green alien, but they weren't convinced that the chamber was harmless to such vermin, as they considered him; and me. The intended to prove both suppositions. Moss was thrown into the trap and a vacuum was quickly made to grow around him, which might have been the wrong way to describe a vacuum if one were speaking scientifically, but it was the way a participant would have described it. Having a vacuum grab oneself was just that. A million hands reached or swooped down and squeezed.
I heard about it before it was over and ran screaming down the corridor. It was about two miles and I ran all the way. As soon as I arrived, they equalized the pressure in the chamber, threw me in to join Moss and gave us both the vacuum.
"They were very angry because they couldn't hurt us," Moss said to me later. "So what?"
"So speaks the voice of ignorance. You don't know the depths and pinnacles your soul is capable of comprehending." "What does that mean?"
He didn't answer. Whatever it meant, the Martians were too busy to comprehend other than the urgency of their situation, or so it seemed. The growth of the green material in their environment was slow but inexorable. Estimates were that the gardens would be unproductive in a few weeks.
The packing began on a morning when the library was so cold I woke up shivering. The hallway was jammed with people who stayed out of my way and refused to answer any of my questions.
"Why waste energy on heating?" said Tata. She was in the barracks, staffing her belongings in a bag. "We're leaving Mars. We're going to Earth." "Home?" I said, thunderstruck.
Her reply was bitter. "To you, maybe. Not to me. Mars is my home. You're running me out of it." "You can't leave!"
"I was bora here," she said. "This place has been my whole life. Now I have three hours to pick up my entire existence and report to the space station."
It was a policy of women and children first, which was exactly the wrong way to do it, considering the conditions of Earth. The fact was that no Martian other than the astronauts knew a thing about their mother planet, and the latter were obeying the mayor's orders and not talking. Actually there wasn't much else that the mayor could have done for her people. Their planet was becoming uninhabitable and there was only one other livable rock in the sky that their ships could reach.
One thing could be said for the Martians; they possessed intelligent and innovative ancestors. The space station was a huge building and most of it had been sealed off for centuries. Now the enormous doors had to be broken down because the operating switches no longer functioned. Behind them was a fleet of ships that stretched farther than the eye could see.
The Martians were startled when they saw how many of the great crafts there were. Evidently many more people had been in the exodus from Earth than were now alive. Scarcely any among them was aware that their population had been steadily declining since the day man first set foot on the red planet.
The only unfortunate thing about finding such a large fleet was that no one knew how to start the engines. There didn't seem to be any operating instructions anywhere.
"There are, in the library," Moss told me. 'Too bad, though, because they're written in old English."
"What's that?" I said.
"The dead language of a dead civilization."
"You can read it. You know everything about Earth."
"As usual, you're forgetting something. These people hate me. They're scared to death of the sight of me. Do you really think they'll let me tell them how to fly their ships?"
"They might listen to me. Teach me how to read English."
Tata had gone on one of the mother ships that had been used to scout Earth. Her husband would have nothing to do with me and even threatened me if I came near him. The mayor was no longer at her technician's job. I walked to the space station and stood at the gate, yelling, until she finally came over.
"You would like it if we flew into the sun," she said, after hearing me out.
"There's a good deal of blood thirst around here, but it isn't mine."
"You want passage into the station so you can steal a ship."
"If I get one fired up and ready for flight, it will prove I know how, won't it?"
I couldn't learn English. "What is this crazy stuff?" I said to Moss. I had been at it for a week and had learned only a few nouns.
"I didn't think you could do it. There isn't enough time. It would take you weeks."
"What will I do, then? They're crawling all over those ships like flies and they don't understand a thing. They aren't like the little machines they've been using all along. These big monsters have practically no moving parts, and nothing seems to work. I know Emeroo doesn't want all the people dead. We've got to do something."
"Let me go in the library and take a look at the old records. 111 see what I can do."
The mayor, whose name was Geba, practically hung on my back while I, in turn, stood on a second floor platform in a huge, silent, dusty spaceship. The thing was so big I couldn't believe it was real. There was no separate cabin for astronauts or pilots, indeed there wasn't even a control panel or any one part reserved for a particular crewman. I stood and lined up a series of small liquid bars superimposed on a sheet of transparent metal embedded in one wall. Then I gripped a lever and tipped the first bar ever so slightly to the right so that the fluid in it began to run upward, and as it touched the edge of the bar above and a bit to its left, the second bar tipped and the fluid in both formed a single stream that tipped the next bar. In a matter of moments, all the liquid in the bars flowed in a continuous, unbroken circle.
"Well done," Emeroo said to me in mind link.
"Naturally."
Geba swung around me until she could see my face. "What is the meaning of your comment?"
"How else would you fire up the nuclear engine of a spaceship? This way, naturally."
"What is nuclear?"
"I only make them work, I don't give lessons."
"If I may interrupt," said Emeroo to me, "you are now required to wait forty-five minutes and then you will feel a slight bump from within the vessel. In the meantime, you will find a chart of the solar system imprinted on a disc at the upper right hand corner of the circle of fluid. I presume you can recognize your homeworld."
Embarrassed because I didn't know Earth from any other globe in the sky, I stared in indecision at the disc.
"See there!" said Geba, leaning around me and examining the object of my attention. "Those are the planets in our solar system." Pointing at one, she said, "Our destination, of course. That is the enigma, the legend, the place where Martians would rather go almost anywhere but."
To Emeroo, I said, "You think I'm so stupid I don't know where my own home is?"
"When you feel the engines come to life, place your thumb on the correct planet and apply pressure. Please don't make a mistake and press Jupiter or Pluto. We want to go to the third from the sun."
"Shut up," I said. "I already know that."
"You're crazy," said Geba. "You're out of your mind. You talk when nobody is here."
"What do you call yourself?"
"It isn't the answer. I know. I know." She shrieked approximately forty-five minutes later when a faint throbbing suddenly began in the ship. "The world is moving! It's an earthquake!"
I told her it was the engines coming to life.
"Three times we've had earthquakes," she said. "Thousands died. That's the only thing wrong with this planet; besides the alien."
I pressed the image of Earth and waited.
Said Emeroo, "Take-off is in exactly one week from this minute. Twenty thousand passengers and not one more. The flight will be automatic. The ship will find its own landing field on Earth and will take off one week from the moment the Mars disc is pressed. Got it?"
All along I had been nursing a private anger. "Who do you think you are, Emeroo? What gives you the right to shuffle a whole species from world to world?" I said all this silently so Geba wouldn't hear.
"Man will survive," Emeroo answered, and then wouldn't talk to me for the rest of the day.
That first ship left for Earth with no one in it. Geba's reason was that she wanted to make certain it worked.
"You aren't making sense," I said. "How will you know if the flight is successful?"
"I'm no fool. I have an agent on Earth who will send the craft back to us. If it gets there in the first place, that is. You may have sent it to Pluto. We Martians don't intend freezing to death."
The ship didn't return because it never arrived on Earth. No one knew where it had gone.
"The automatic controls must have been rusty or something," I said to Geba.
"No doubt, and please hope the controls on the next vessel are rust resistant, as you are making the flight."
That sounded fine with me. Emeroo promised me the second ship was in perfect working order. "Stop making plans," she said to me. "You're thinking that as soon as you land on Earth you'll jump ship. Be assured the Martians believe otherwise."
What she said was the absolute truth. Geba and three others laid their lives on the line by accompanying me to Earth. All had guns, none had a sense of humor or any empathy or compassion for a suffering alien. They didn't give me enough to eat and allowed me to go to the bathroom once a day.
The flight took three days, one to get out of orbit and into full flight, one day traveling faster than light, and the third preparing for landing. I didn't get to see Earth, I didn't get to see anything but the four metal walls of the second floor of the ship. The rows of gray seats were overly familiar to me by then.
"Why don't you release me?" I said to Geba, after we landed. 'Til disappear and you'll never see me again."
"Believe me, I don't feel the least bit regretful declining your offer. You will never contaminate our environment again,"
What she meant wasn't exactly clear to me then. I stayed on the ship for the full week that it sat somewhere on Earth and then three guards left and Geba and I headed back toward Mars. She put her gun away and was quite civil during the return trip, saying I could do no damage and she didn't feel like keeping me under guard for nothing.
Once we were back on Mars, she made certain that I never got anywhere near the spaceport A solid wall of guards stood in the corridor and let everyone through but me. If I got too close to the station, a guard left the ranks and followed on my heels.
A group of Martians decided they weren't going anywhere. Their idea was to transport themselves in vehicles to the other side of Mars and build another sector. The green menace surely wouldn't be able to get across the deep abysses that lay in the way. In the meantime, spaceships were leaving for Earth on a regular schedule. Those that returned stayed one week to pick up another load and then lifted off again.  "They're just about all gone except for the radicals," I said to Moss one day. "What I want to know is where they think they're going to put me on Earth."
"Or elsewhere."
"Well, that's a dumb idea. I'm from Earth. As a matter of fact, it mostly belongs to me."
"The two of you may agree about which is the squatter, but my advice to you is not to anticipate anything from the Martians but stress and strain."
The radicals who were planning to build a Utopia on the far side of the world changed their minds when the tremors started. I had read a good deal about the old earthquakes, so when the first hard shudder was felt, I went hunting for Moss. I couldn't find him. In fact, I couldn't locate a single green mass anywhere.
"He went in that direction," said a Martian, pointing beyond the sector.
"Into the desert?"
"Right. Early this morning."
It made me angry. There I was, intensely worried about getting back home, and Emeroo had to gather herself all up and go for a walk in the desert. Worse, it would soon be night, which meant I couldn't follow.
The next day there were more tremors. The Martians began being extremely kind to me. They continued to block me off from the spaceport, but they let me have all I wanted to eat, and any time I felt like having some conversation, someone made themselves available. Finally I went hunting for Geba.
"In that library is a lot of fiction," I said. "I know you people never took time to read it, but one thing I picked up was that a condemned woman about to face a firing squad was always offered a last cigarette. I believe all the food and kindness you're giving me is my last cigarette. Am I wrong?"
"Now that I know we'll never see you again, I'm feeling a kind of affection for you. In a way you remind me of my daughter."
"Did you ever think, when you were little, that you would grow up to be a murderer?"
"We took you from Earth to save your life and you brought us death. Many of us are not going to make it. It wasn't my decision alone. All the mayors cast votes."
"You're going to leave me here on Mars."
"Originally we planned to leave a nuclear bomb in the cannery. That way you would have been sure to be in the main blast. However, it seems that nature has a different idea. Our machines predict a drastic quake within the next week or two. The fault out there in the desert is going to shift. When the noise is over, there won't be a thing left in one piece in this quarter of the planet. So, you see, it was actually fortunate for us that the green creature invaded us when it did. We couldn't possibly have prepared for evacuation at a more opportune time. Another week and it would have been too late for all of us."

Chapter XV
Ghosts haunted me. Hated so much by my own kind that they had abandoned me on a hostile world to die in a disaster, I sank into deep mental depression. It would have seemed more honorable and dignified if they had executed me before they left. I couldn't bear to go into the spaceport anymore. It was too empty and desolate. The ships the Martians hadn't needed for their own transportation had been sent on a oneway trip to Jupiter so that I couldn't make an escape. The only vehicles at my disposal were the desert rovers and fliers, but I left them untouched since I had no place to go. Not even the cannery held any fascination for me. Skinny as a bone, I wandered through the place and tried to drum up some interest in something. The Martians had taken practically all their canned goods but there was still enough left to last me several weeks, in the event that the earthquake didn't occur. Not that I cared. Nobody liked me. I was anathema to my brethren. Surely I had some kind of disease of the soul to make everyone who made my acquaintance inevitably sever the relationship in a violent manner.
Whether the winds were a prelude to the coming upheaval, I neither knew nor cared. To occupy my gray mind, I removed a small partition from the hallway and sat looking out at the desert through the transparent wall. Gusts dug holes in the ground and tossed sand and the Martian air was so gritty the sun was blocked out.
"Reee," said a voice in my head that repeated itself when I didn't answer. "It's time for you to come."
"I'm staying here to be killed by the earthquake," I said. That's what everybody wants, and I believe in majority rule."
"It isn't what I want."
"Who are you? You're nobody. Don't bother me anymore. Just don't speak to me or anything."
"There isn't time for you to talk out your hostilities. Well do that another time."
"I said leave me alone! You're the one who got me into all my troubles. It's your fault they hate me."
"Go to the spaceport, get into a rover and start toward the garden."
I didn't respond, just sat and glared at the gray land outside and wished I was already dead. I wondered if the Martian terrain would support worms long enough for my body to be consumed. The thought of my flesh blowing out there in the wind was enough to bring back all the ghosts in. my mind. I clearly recalled my mother, probably the only human being in the cosmos who had ever been concerned for my welfare. So immersed in self-pity did I become that I tracked up the window with my tears.
A tremor knocked me off balance and I bashed my nose against the plastic. For a moment I was frightened by the blood, but then the grayness of my spirit took over and left me only depressed.
Pieces of the ceiling began to fall around me and I had to decide where I wanted to make my grave. I chose the outside but realized I might fail to reach the spaceport which was the only exit. It didn't matter a great deal to me. The tremor didn't stop, or at least it seemed not to. No doubt there was a series of shocks that quickly followed one another. The sector began to rock like a boat sailing on the body of Indigo. The noise got on my nerves and I started to run, at the same time dodging falling debris.
The great door to the spaceport was ripped from its moorings and had fallen inward, blocking the passage. I was so sick inside that I wanted to sit down and die right there, but the thought of a grave under the open sky made me climb up one side of the sloping door, slip through the crack and slide down the other side.
The spaceport ceiling had fallen in and the debris ahead of me was like a ridge of mountains. It looked like too much work. I crawled into it and lay down to go to sleep.
The pile bucked and leaped. Objects kept banging me and jabbing into me. I began crawling through bent and broken junk, secure in the knowledge that I would never make it. A voice in my head kept calling my name, but I had been hit too many times and couldn't distinguish reality from imagination. I forgot all about dying and believed I was climbing mountains on Earth.
It was a beautiful place, old Earth. There were miles of rolling white meadows, huge sod mounds, a vicious red finger of rock where I made my home, and every evening it rained and tore pieces off my house. I had a beautiful bird named Belios and together we went anywhere we took a notion. It was always hot because the sun was big, red and strong.
I managed to get through the debris and was busily crawling across a wide expanse of sand when a crack of sound picked up and threw me into the sky. Landing on my stomach and getting most of the air knocked out of me, I lay gasping and complaining. Dying wasn't the easy process I had always supposed it to be.
"Where have you been?" said Moss, kneeling beside me and supporting my head in his lap.
"What business is it of yours?"
"You're covered with blood."
"I think all my bones are broken."
"Let's get into the ship."
Raising to a sitting position, I blinked and swayed and peered at the horizon. "What ship?"
"It's right there in front of you. Remember the first one, the one that didn't return? I fixed it so it would orbit and then come back down. If there's one thing I understand, it's human beings. Except you."
"I'm staying here! They all hate me. I don't want to live. Right here is where my soul starts its trip through eternity."
"What about Bell is? What about me? Do you think we can get along without you?"
"Neither of you is human so what's the difference?"
Green eyes pierced mine. "That means we don't count for anything?"
"Don't try and con me!" I croaked. "You think I don't understand that you keep me around because you're bored? I'm your little entertainer! What does my life really count? You're using me, and you always have!" I stared up at Moss in shock for a moment and then my voice lowered to a whisper. "Hey, I didn't mean that. I never saw you look like that before." I began complaining in earnest. "What have I done? Emeroo, I take it back, I didn't mean it!"
A crack of sound landed squarely on my head, and reality mercifully turned black.
The first thing I did when I came to my senses was look around for somebody green. Though the color was in abundance in every direction, none of it was in the form of my ancient friend.
"Emeroo?" I said, trying to locate something in my head besides my own muddled thoughts. "Where am I?"
The question went unanswered but it didn't matter because I knew I was back home on Earth. Obviously I had spent the trip from Mars in an unconscious state. The sun overhead told me it was the middle of the day. Any moment now it would probably rain. I lay on a large flat stone overlooking a thick jungle. Above me were the arms of a great tree. I climbed onto one and searched for a cup leaf, found one full and looked at my reflection in the clear water. The sight of two brown eyes staring back at me gave me a chill.
I told myself that I didn't care. If Emeroo wanted to abandon me now, it only proved that I wasn't the type to have friends. Being at home should help to revive my spirit. I would go on, and I would do it with no help from anyone.
It took me a few days to discover I was on a small island completely surrounded by Indigo. There were a few animals and a number of fruit trees, a section of jungle, and myself and one Martian. He was about my age, small and thin, with long dark hair and dark eyes. At first he wore the full Martian regalia of heavy pants, shirt and boots, but the heat finally drove him to tear the legs off his pants and rid himself of everything else. I could tell he was unhappy with his semi-nude state for he remained hidden in a tree for three days. Hunger eventually forced him down.
"Don't I know you?" he said.
"Probably."
"I've never seen you before, but everyone has heard of you."
"Who's everyone?"
"The Martian people," he said.
"Oh, yes, I forgot they were the end-all of existence."
"What are you doing alive?"
"Strictly my choice."
He looked neither relieved nor annoyed, nor even much interested. What really occupied his attention, at least for the time being, was finding his way home. Like myself, he had no idea where he was. He had been snatched from another island and brought here. Living with a group of his own people and getting along as best he could, he had been climbing down from a tree when a green tentacle came from nowhere, wrapped about his throat, cut off his air and made him lose consciousness. He awoke in another tree overhanging the rock upon which I lay.
His name was Natha and he hadn't much imagination. "I can't understand any of this," he said. "I don't want to be here or anywhere on this planet. I despise all of it."
"You're in this particular spot to serve as therapy for me."
"What does that mean?"
"Don't worry about meaning. You have as much choice in the matter as I, which is none at all. Just see that you eat what I eat and nothing else. Some of the fruit growing on the trees and bushes are poison."
"I suspect that when you get good and ready you'll kill me," he said. "That's what I'm really doing here, isn't it? To provide you with sport?"
"That isn't the kind of therapy I was talking about, but don't bother trying to make sense. I've never yet met a Martian who was rational."
Quiet little plotter that he was, Natha made no response but set about constructing a rain shelter in the lowest limbs of the big tree. In the meantime, I climbed onto the highest branches and took a long look at the island. Indigo's deep blue color was a vivid contrast to the small green forest.
The rain began just after sunset. I had overlapped several large leaves above me and then settled into a shallow depression midway out on the limb. The rain drove straight down, smacked my roof and splashed away.
Soon Natha began yelling. The roof of his shelter was catching everything that fell from the upper branches. The noise was deafening and probably scared him. I lay thinking that I should help him but it was too difficult for me to move. My mind was clogged with ennui. Some time during the night I fell asleep. I awoke in darkness and found myself falling from my resting place. I hit a limb with one shoulder, dropped astraddle another, instinctively squeezed my legs together, swung over into a head-down position and hung there, swaying dangerously and wondering what had happened to me.
The next morning I found Natha sitting on the flat rock under the tree. "You climbed up during the rain," I said. "You shoved me off."
His expression was frightened. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"You were stupid building your rain shelter so low, so you took out your anger on me. You tried to kill me."
A hint of bluster in his tone, he said, "Now you're being stupid. If I wanted to do that, I'd wait until after you've showed me how to survive here."
"I think you had that in mind but just lost your temper last night."
Deciding to starve him into being more civil, I went off alone and had breakfast where he couldn't see me. His people must have been eating the supplies they brought from Mars and hadn't yet sampled the local flora.
My plan didn't work. Martians were so accustomed to an inadequate diet that when nothing at all was available they spent most of their time sleeping. Natha became thinner but he didn't give in. At last I ate where he could see the fruit I chose.
"You know, don't you, that your kind originated on this world?" I said to him one day.
"So I've been told, but I'm beginning to have my doubts. How could intelligent life endure such weather?"
"It used to be worse, several hundred years ago. Would you like me to describe the conditions then?"
"Stop that kind of talk. I can't abide a liar."
"Nor a truth teller, either."
Beneath the jungle were black bottomlands, but I was afraid to go there. They weren't as far away as those in my world of five centuries ago, and I was afraid Indigo was encroaching upon them. Certainly there was nothing to stop her. Blue fringes lay on the beach and sluggishly heaved without consuming any more territory. At times she sent a finger of herself in my direction, but she didn't really seem intent upon reaching me.
"Hey, hog!" I yelled at her. "Why don't you leave something of the world for me and those Martians?"
She didn't answer and I sat down to brood. Mars was no longer fit for people to live on, and it might not be fit for a long time, depending upon how violent the earthquakes had been. Meanwhile Earth grew more hostile daily. Either mankind was about to become extinct, or something startling would happen to the environment.
While I sat and considered my own plight, someone tried to drop a boulder on my head. Natha must have tied a vine around the big rock and then spent half a day hauling it up the tree beneath which I sat. Fortunately the perspiration leaking into his eyes plus the spatial distortion caused by the humidity spoiled his aim. The rock landed three feet in front of me, squarely in Indigo who reacted by sinking beneath the weight and then erupting and tossing several blue balls into the jungle.
A few hours later I hid in a tree and dropped a vine of my own over Natha's head as he walked under me. Not too gently I hauled him up and tied him to a limb.
"Stay there and starve," I said, and went away.
The next day I went back, but he was gone, which didn't surprise me as I hadn't tied him tightly.
Using leaves, he began scooping up the scattered balls of Indigo and leaving them where I usually slept or sat. That meant I had to find other places to do those things, since Indigo never touched anything without leaving a residue and I was even wary of that.
I stood in the top of the big tree and quietly talked to the silence. "Emeroo, do you see what's going on here. Do you see how much Natha and I love each other? Isn't that what you wanted? This is what can happen when you interfere with lives. Natha is going to kill me or I'm going to have to kill him in self defense."
"Can't we be friends?" Natha said to me on one of the tree trails.
"What do you have in mind now?" "Only friendship."
Not that I believed him, but I joined him for dinner and was surprised when I started to bite into a red fruit he offered me and found the peel loose. It didn't belong to that particular fruit.
"What's under this peeling?" I said. "I see it's another fruit, and not one I would eat by choice. You're trying to poison me."
He didn't take time to answer, just leaped to his feet and started running.
"Next time I see you I'll throw you into Indigo!" I yelled. I might have done it if he hadn't seen me first. He knew more about weapons than I, being from a crafty and irritable species, so it probably wasn't too difficult for him to make the bow and arrow. There were plenty of flexible plants and reeds on the island, also an abundance of vines and sharp stones.
One hot afternoon I was swinging through the trees, minding my own business and thinking of better days, when Natha shot me. My fall broke off the arrow and left the stone head embedded in the right side of my back. I heard him coming and managed to stand on my feet. He stopped as soon as he saw me.
"I hit you!" he said in a little mean voice.
"You missed."
"I saw you fall. I hit you good'. You're dead."
"Then come ahead and finish me. Come on. Come closer."
He stepped back. "You still have a lot of strength left You're no lady, you're just a big dumb Earth brat with more muscles than brains or culture. I'll go away and relax, and by and by I'll hunt up your corpse and kick it into that blue blob out there."
That evening he found me in the top of the tree. Standing below me on a limb, he fired arrows that hit leaves and limbs but missed my weaving figure. "You have a long way to fall when you weaken," he said. "You'd be better off letting me put one of these arrows in your heart or your eye."
During the rain, he sat directly below me under entwined leaves. I, on the other hand, sat directly under the downpour, ignorant enough to hope the rain would wash out the arrowhead in my back. All it did was clean off the blood caked on me and the tree.
In the morning Natha ate breakfast and talked to me about the plans of the Martians. They would survive, he assured me. Of course they would have to make a great slaughter in the equatorial regions, which were the only habitable places. The bugs would have to go, since they were dangerous, and also the big bird which was always bothering everyone would have to be destroyed. The Martians would multiply and eventually fill up all the islands. One day they intended to go to war against Indigo. Everything would turn out fine and the name of the planet would be changed to Mars Two.
Two days later I stopped pretending I was going to make it. I was determined not to collapse where Natha could find my corpse. I didn't know where he was at the moment, but since it was noon he was probably hunting for food, so tying a vine about my waist, I tied the other end to a limb and started climbing down. Suddenly I heard a laugh and knew Natha was nearby and had seen me. I didn't think he had the courage to come near me and I believed he was too cruel to shoot me again and end his entertainment.
He climbed up the other side of the tree and when I was about fifteen feet from the ground he cut the other end of the vine. The wind was knocked out of me when I landed. Since I couldn't walk to Indigo, I began crawling to her, and by the time Natha realized my intent it was almost too late. It seemed to enrage him that he might not have an opportunity to be further amused by me. Racing up behind me, he grabbed the end of the vine still attached to my waist and dragged me back along the ground.
I clung to a root until he became exasperated and started toward me. I managed to give his knee a strong kick and he leaped away, howling. Again I crawled and again he hauled on the vine. This time he only came toward me halfway when I grabbed another root, and then he went back to dragging me.
The beach was green and mossy, and it seemed smaller today, or perhaps my vision was blurred. Somewhere along the way I got rid of the vine, and every so often I rolled over to kick at Natha. He held the vine and tried to beat me with it I didn't care, the last few yards. No matter what he did, he couldn't keep me from Indigo. While the vine lashed me, I crawled from the jungle and across the moss. My fingers groped for the blue body ahead.
"Come on, monster!" I gasped. "You've been after me all my life. Now come and get me!"
Indigo did. She crossed the moss like graceful fluid, gathered me up on a cresting wave and held me there. Turning my head, I took a last look at my world. Natha stood in the jungle, shrieking and stamping his feet in anger. All of a sudden his rage changed to terror as a blue tentacle whipped upward and outward and took him by the neck. Writhing and screaming, he plunged into the depths ahead of me.

Chapter XVI
Since the day I was born, nothing ever worked out for me. I went into Indigo with the intent of dying and ending my misery.
"Yes," she said, "it's a fine idea, doing away with you, but it is forbidden."
"Since when?" I said.
"I can't answer that because I don't have the information. However, if you'll take note, you're encapsulated in a bubble so that I can't touch you. Where it came from is a mystery to me."
"You're lying," I said as I sank through blue that grew darker. "I can't see any bubble."
 I sank and drifted, and by and by a metal fish drew alongside me. It was three feet long with a tiny propeller on the end of its long tail. A rod emerged from its mouth, clamped around my ankles and then it began shoving me through Indigo.
"Emeroo, do you think I don't know you're behind this?" I said with the last of my breath.
Expecting to be taken to some deep, mechanical complex, I was surprised when the fish shoved me to the surface. I didn't see the island until we landed on the beach.
"Obviously you can't survive on your own. How long will you go on requiring external assistance, do you think?" It was Moss who spoke. He knelt over me and shone a small light into my eyes.
"Forever, maybe. Haven't you heard it's a symbiotic universe? But what's the difference? I'm not going anywhere. You're so skinny you couldn't carry a Martian, and I can't walk."
"Your slave will assist me."
He was talking about Natha who just then walked out of the jungle and stood where I could see him. He wasn't as green as Emeroo but was a much lighter shade.
"Ill do anything you ask, master," he said to me.
"Go away. I don't want to see your ugly face."
Obediently he turned and started into the jungle. Moss called him back and he promptly returned to stand beside me. I would have been interested in a conversation concerning ethics, right then, but I had lost too much blood besides which my temperature was sky high and I hallucinated too much to make sense. Sometimes I saw Moss, sometimes Natha, and at other times my companions were giant mondus who hung from tree limbs and tickled my face. Much of my delirium was in technicolor. Usually I had visions of a smooth and unlined expanse of sand that flickered out of my head and was replaced by the same scene all cracked, broken and colored bloody red. For some reason that second scene terrified me, and I howled and kicked until someone slapped me in the face with something cold.
My only friend and my slave delivered me into a cold, hard machine that turned me upside down, lowered my body temperature, yanked the piece of rock out of my back, sloshed burning fluid into the cavernous wound, sewed me up as if I were a rag doll, patted me on the rump with a needle the size of a tree limb, and then dumped me onto a slab of metal.
Shaking, trembling, freezing, I bellowed for the sun which miraculously appeared above me, except that it was small and round and too white to be the one I wanted, but I couldn't complain about its heating power. Not only did it keep me warm, it burned my skin and then I had to be creamed and lathered with a slimy substance.
"I'll do anything you ask, master."
"Go stand on your head in the corner."
That sort of thing hadn't too much entertainment value as Natha couldn't see straight afterwards and often got lotion in my hair, for which sin I made him stare at the tip of his nose for five minutes, or some such other foolishness.
The heat lamp did me a world of good and it wasn't long before I lost my delirium and began to look about me. It seemed I was lying in the arm of a giant tree. On the next highest limb hung the sunlamp. Natha walked back and forth on my limb, sometimes passing me, but always returning to peer into my face.
"Have you any punishment in mind for the moment, master?"
 "Nothing drastic, as I'm too weak to have much imagination. I feel sorry for you, thinking how it will be when I'm better."
"Yes, master."
"Go fetch me an apple; a white one, and make sure it's soft."
"Yes, master." Away he went and brought back exactly what I ordered.
"Where's Moss?" I said.
"Who is Moss, master?"
"Moss. Moss! He's been here all along."
"No one has been here but me, master. There was a personage on the beach who put some fluid in your arm vein."
"That must have been Moss. Well, was it?"
"It wasn't a real person, master. It was a large machine that had two red eyes and no nose. It talked. It said it was a hospital."
I didn't believe it. "You can't tell me you and I have been in this tree alone!"
"The hospital placed you in this cavity, master, and also secured the lamp. That's all I know."
Actually he knew a good deal more than that, but I didn't learn about it right away. All I cared about then was Moss. He hadn't been there. My feverish mind dreamed him up. The universe hadn't changed. Nobody cared.
"Who made you my slave?" I said.
"The blue one."
"You're crazy."
"Yes, master."
I had no pain in my back but I couldn't move my right arm. It was covered with a thin, transparent coating of something that held it in a neutral position. Day by day the material lost its rigidity until it eventually evaporated completely. Natha continued to serve me, brought me my meals, cleaned up after me, rubbed me with herbal oils, and entertained me by standing on his head and making faces.
"The sight of you grows more obnoxious to me, which means my conscience must be bothering me," I said. "I'll probably like us both better if I quit being sadistic. No more punishment for you. There isn't a thing I can do about the fact that you did this to me." "Yes, master."
It didn't take me long to recover. In a week I was out of the tree and exploring the island. "Don't walk so close," I said to Natha. "You're tramping on my heels."
"Yes, master."
"Climb to the top of that tree and tell me what you see." "Jungle and Indigo," he reported. "That's all this world is anymore!"
One day I stood on a high hill and watched a black speck wing its way through the sky. "Don't tell me Moss hasn't been around," I said to Natha. "I know my klufe when I see her, and she couldn't possibly have found me by accident. A certain green fellow must have directed her."
That old Bellis! I couldn't ride her and she complained so much that I had to throw rocks at her to drive her away. She spent her time circling the island, eating most of the tree foliage and screeching her head off.
"Does her noise bother you?" I said.
"You love the beast, master."
We were both stretched out on a limb, hidden from the noon sun. Natha had to wear an extra thick coating of oil, but even that didn't keep him from burning. He looked ripe and ready to split.
"Why are you my slave?" I said suddenly. "Don't you have any choice?"
"No, master. The blue one controls my will."
"Don't you mean the green one?"
'They're all the same."
"Why, you dunderhead, they're no such thing!" I said. "They're two totally different entities."
"I'll agree with you, master, though it doesn't seem factual. The blue one is in my brain, which is capable of discerning color and nature, much like one can see shades even with the eyes closed. The blue one cannot maintain that shade, but slips into green and back again. Blue or green, it doesn't matter."
"I don't like you for saying that. I don't like being turned upside down without Warning."
"Shall I jump from the tree to my death, master?" "Just shut up and sit down."
In a few weeks the cast on my arm and shoulder had evaporated, and I was almost ready to take flight. "How do I get rid of you, Natha?" I said. "I don't want you tagging after me for the rest of my life."
"You have the power to release me. Only tell me I'm free."
"Do you want to be free?"
"No, master, I love you."
"I'll bet."
The day came when I was ready to leave the island. It hadn't occurred to me that I had no place to go. Transportation was available, I was in good health, the weather was perfect for traveling, the world was wide and my bird and I were afflicted with wanderlust.
"Do you know where your old camp is?" I said to Natha.
"Yes, master, or at least the general direction."
Whistling for Bellis, I said, "Get ready to hop on behind me. We're getting out of here."
Natha had never been anywhere but Mars and had never ridden anything higher than a spaceship, so when Bellis carried us into the naked sky with a shrill scream, he gave a scream of his own and slumped against my back. I'd been expecting it and put one hand behind me and held him. He had already indicated the route we were to take, and when the first island came into view, I kicked Bellis into aiming for it.
The island was empty of man, so, staying on the same course, we headed onward over Indigo. Some smoke curled from the jungle of the second oasis and I prepared to land Bellis on the top of the first giant tree I found. There weren't any large enough. The island was one of those that had only rocks and foliage. I hunted for and found the next best thing, a plateau of stone.
"You're free," I said. "You are no longer my slave."
Natha stood looking at me for a moment and then blinked in an odd way. Stepping back, he looked at me and I saw the old hatred flare in his expression.
"You'll never learn much, no matter how long you live," I said.
"My only hope is that we never meet again." "You'll probably get that wish, which will be your loss. So long, Martian."
It took me four days to find Moss.
"Don't pretend to be cross with me," he said. "I know you were getting worried that I might not be around anywhere."
"Don't be dumb. You're like the weather, always available."
As a matter of fact, he was correct. Those four days of searching had chilled my bones and threatened to empty my soul. I had passed over many islands with Martian inhabitants, but for some reason I'd had the feeling that I hadn't observed one single human.
Moss was doing some more scientific experiments. "Do you know what is required to change lead into gold?"
"What?"
"Well, not exactly those substances, but I still feel like an alchemist. Consider, if you will, that man was messy and his garbage pile grew so out of control that he had to move on top of it. Then along comes the alchemist and whistles for her garbage eater."
"What?"
"This garbage eater is too big to just tell to go away. I mean, where can something that huge go?"
"Moss, quit fiddling with those test tubes and let's go find dinner."
"You just ate."
"What about a quiet walk?"
"Ummm, about that garbage eater ... you were supposed to blend in with the scenery, you know?"
"Obviously it didn't work," I said, following his line of thought with ease. "You wanted Natha and I to establish an important relationship. I keep telling you the Martians take one look at me and hate me. To them I'm a freak. Subconsciously they know I belong in another world."
"I thought you'd be able to take better care of yourself. Your problem is that you're too honest."
Peering closely at him, I said, "How come you're not using words like 'ignorant', 'inexperienced', or 'pesty'?"
He scowled. "Maybe I feel differently today. How do I know?"
"I especially like you when you play human, but you're only acting. You experimented with me and Natha, and it didn't work. What do you have in mind for me next?"
He didn't answer, dropped the test tubes and walked into the jungle. I followed.
"That garbage eater you talked about reminds me of a mondu crawling along and dragging its bag of young behind it," I said.
Moss kept on walking and I continued needling him.
"The bag is part of the mondu, but it could be severed without the mondu suffering anything but emotional trauma."
He walked so fast I lost him. One moment he was there, the next he rounded a bit of foliage and disappeared. At the time, it didn't matter much to me. I had some thinking to do.
I sat on the beach with my feet stretched toward the garbage eater who was changing the world into something I neither liked nor understood. What would Earth be like without rolling white meadows, sod mounds and moss plains? Pictures of the planet with a naked surface didn't answer my question.. I had seen such pictures in the metal whale; mementos of the past. And what of Indigo? Part of Emeroo, as Natha had said? An appetite out of control, Indigo had been set loose millennia ago, and now she had eaten her way to a state of near omnipresence. In the meantime Emeroo, in the form of Moss, was changing the entire vast blue mass into . . . water? Why? Because she had to do something with her time?
"Indigo," I said.
The portion by my feet heaved.
"How old is she?" I said.
"Old," came the answer in a soft, deep voice.
"Will she ever die?"
"Probably not."
"You've been playing games with me. You're a swindler. All along you pretended to want to kill me. You just wanted to be entertained. I'm getting a little bit tired of being property. When am I ever going to be free?"
Indigo didn't answer, just lay quietly munching at the beach. Grumpy, I sat up and glared at the sky. Again I kicked at the blue mass. "Where's Moss? I'm getting hungry."
"He's dead," whispered the voice that seemed to come from far across the glittering mass.
"What? What are you talking about?"
''Moss has outlived his usefulness."
I felt nothing but anger then. "Usefulness to who or what?"
"Today you are ignorant, inexperienced and pesty."
Tears came from nowhere, or so it seemed, gushing down my cheeks, filling my mouth. "Moss isn't dead. He isn't just a play man."
"He was no man at all. Man lives on the islands that beckon you."
"You're a liar! I want Moss. I don't want anything or anyone but Moss!"
"Your state of arrested development will finally break. Or, at least, hopefully."
For days I wandered over the island. Forgetting to eat, I lost weight. When the pain was bad, I threw rocks at Bellis who circled overhead in anticipation of a flight somewhere.
"Moss!" I would call, searching in despair. I climbed trees to see if he was hiding in the high foliage. I dug holes in the ground, but Indigo had made a disaster area of what used to be fine bottomlands, and I couldn't probe more than a foot or two. Moss had left his table and his test tubes untouched.
"Not anymore, Emeroo!" I sobbed. "I'm finally done with you. I hate you. You make me sick!"
For days I cried. I wasn't normal because my world wasn't normal. My only friend had destroyed my only friend, and I was enraged at the former though the latter was in fact part of ...
I did very little. Once in a while I took Bellis for a ride, but mostly I sat on the island and grieved. The table and test tubes had been dumped into Indigo. Not at all discriminating, she had accepted them without grace.
Her eating began to get on my nerves. At night I lay in a tree and listened to her munching. Occasionally I considered that she might be so out of control that she intended to eat the world, insides and all. I imagined that one day there would be nothing in this section of the solar system but a round blue alimentary canal which ate any and all debris coming its way through space.
The days went by and I slowly lost my zest for life. Just when I had thought reality might be worth looking at again, it turned gray and drab. Actually I might just as well roll over and die like one of the big bugs.
One morning Bellis woke me up with her shrieking. Sitting up, I discovered Indigo under my tree. There wasn't anything else in sight anywhere but her and my tree. During the night she had eaten the rest of the island. Bellis was overhead and having a fit because there was nothing for breakfast. The message was obvious. It was time for me to move on.
Emeroo wasn't above making mistakes, and she made one that day. Bellis came down and bore me away moments before Indigo knocked down my tree. The top branches were sinking as I and my klufe wheeled away for distant parts. We headed toward the equatorial regions and Recreation, but we didn't make it.
Since there was nothing beneath us but flat Indigo, Bellis and I saw no reason to fly high. We were practically skimming the blue surface when an island suddenly popped into view. Bellis started to climb just as Indigo erupted. She came up into the sky and formed four walls around us so that the only way we could go was straight toward the island. Once above it, we found the wall over our heads lowering. There was nothing Bellis could do but land, which she did in the tops of some giant trees.
It was a large island; I could tell that without getting off my klufe. It was also inhabited. Smoke rose from the jungle a mile or so in the distance.

Chapter XVII
The Martians were learning all the ins and outs of cooking over open fires. Vegetables and fruits were being scorched at all hours of the day by experimenters or the genuinely hungry. On Mars, only the cooks had been familiar with fire. Here, everyone saw how it functioned and all were fascinated. Nearly everybody on the island had a burn or two.
"It's amazing that you were able to find this particular island," said Geba.
I made no response to that since luck or accident had nothing to do with my being there. She was the mayor, elected by people who didn't have enough sense to get out of the rain. Mostly they were doing things wrong. It would take them a long time to accustom themselves to a longer day. Meanwhile they were dropping asleep in unwise places at unwise times. Either the noon or evening rains caught them in the open or the giant bugs in the valley removed them from their perches and carried them away.
Geba and her circle of advisers allowed me to share their dinner.
"We're determined to become ultra-civilized," she said. "For this reason, we say we're gratified that you weren't destroyed in the earthquake. In fact, you're much the same as we are, except you have pituitary problems."
"In fact, those centuries your people spent in a hostile environment stunted their growth."
Geba was small and dark-haired with big eyes, a flat face and a blunt little figure. Now she frowned as she slowly chewed on a melon larger than her head. "You are totally nude. That isn't civilized."
"You'll discover, after a while, that you'll itch to death if you wear anything. Each morning be sure and rub your bodies with the big soft leaves from the highest trees. They'll provide a protective oil."
"We can't undress. That would be the first step toward barbarism. Never mind that; tell us why the blue parasite was a different color on our homeworld. There it was a vivid green."
How chatty she had become, how inoffensive, how amiable and trustworthy; almost overnight. I didn't believe a word or glance of it. What she said was all right, but there was the old awkwardness and stiffness in her and the others. They had done all they could to kill me on Mars. The last thing they wanted was to share a melon, an island or a world with me. I wasn't deceived. Emeroo had placed me squarely into the hands of my enemies.
At least part of what Geba said about wanting to be civilized was true. They wouldn't take hold of me in the daylight. They would wait for night when they couldn't see one another's evil.
That evening I was paraded about the camp which was quite extensive. There were approximately two thousand people, all told, and the majority were there to get a glimpse of me.
"You have no shame," they said with one booming voice, and I smiled like a happy simpleton and continued to parade with Geba until she tired and took me to watch the construction of her shack. The workers were making it out of the limbs and leaves of a tippet shrub which shed its foliage each and every week. The shack would be worthless in a few days, its slanted leaves dry and dead. However I said nothing, having made up my mind to be gone from the island before they had a decent reason for wanting to persecute me. Prior to sundown, most of the people scurried to their nests and holes to burrow like bugs because the night, the moon, the open air and their freedom frightened them. Geba made a final show of friendliness, patted me on the back, accompanied me to my bed on a low tree limb, and then went away after promising to be there early in the morning to greet me.
Firstly, I'd never sleep that low to the ground where the laziest giant could pluck me up. Secondly, though it didn't always rain each evening, one was wiser to be prepared for a deluge, and upper branches were better. Thirdly, if I had my way I wouldn't be around for Geba's morning greeting, not that I could do anything about my escape in the darkness as Bellis lay limp as a rag and snoring on the tree top and couldn't be budged. It took me most of the night to reach her. The jungle was my territory, not the Martians'. Jungles were my home, familiar and known to me. Clumsy as a multipede when grace wasn't called for, I could walk across brush without creating a whisper of sound, if I had to. If need be, I could climb a tree like a blister, slithering along the bark as if I were one of those flat little beasts that mewed when alarmed and scuttled for darkness.
The only problem was, Geba had stationed about a hundred guards in my particular tree, and I had to spend hours moving through them. Fortunately most of them weren't alert. They didn't get as many sleep periods as they would have liked and consequently were usually in a state of drowsiness. I made good time after nightfall because the rain came and muffled sounds of my passage, but that night happened to be one when the rain was brief. Then the moon rose and I had to make certain no shaft of light hit me as I climbed.
At dawn I was astride Bellis and feeling proud of myself. The feeling had short reign. Light hit my klufe when the sun cleared the horizon, and she reacted as if she had been struck. Her ugly eyes opened, her head bobbed and finally stayed up, she spread her wings wide, stretched her legs and gave a hideous scream.
Kicking her, I yelled, "Let's go!" and away we went, about forty feet. When cut, klufes don't bleed much, even though they're large and muscular. I had thought I was so self-sufficient, so clever, yet during the night Martians had quietly climbed ahead of me and clipped the wings of my big bird; not her main spread but the short thrusts growing close to her sides. She couldn't fly any more than I. Luckily she didn't land on her head when we fell but ended up laid flat out on the jungle.
No doubt her cry had awakened every Martian on the island. Knowing both I and Bellis were dead if they caught us, I kicked my stunned and disbelieving animal squarely in the throat. She hated such treatment and usually responded by flying at top speed straight into the sky. What happened then was that she took a healthy hop and cleared a tree in our path. Again I kicked her.
The Martians had anticipated a crippled bird and a humble human prisoner. Now they had a pair of noisy maniacs to chase. Since they were afraid of their environment, then-sleeping quarters were all in one area, so none of them was able to get in front of Bellis and me. It wouldn't have made a great deal of difference, for their weapons were rocks and clubs which did no damage to the klufe and merely grazed me as they were hurled.
I kept kicking Bellis and she continued to scream and hopped over the jungle. There was only one place to go and I saw no reason to be reluctant to arrive there since only trouble lay behind. Bellis took a few right turns, in spite of my kicks, until finally she also realized there was but one course open to us.
Indigo rose and descended, lazy swells making her look like an upsidedown sky. Her fringes curled in anticipation as we approached.
"Here we come, you fat glutton, and if you kill my klufe you'll kill me at the same time!" I shouted. "Open up!"
She surely heard me but no opening appeared in her gross self, which was to the good as Bellis and I had never learned how to exist without air. The klufe's final and frantic hop lifted us into the sky and for a moment I thought she was going to fly. Then she fell, belly-first and spread out like a shadow.
Indigo gave a loud belch as our mass smacked against her. Displacement and recovery took a few moments and then her blueness engulfed Bellis like fluid and came to a shuddering halt as soon as it touched my feet. Immediately the blue receded from the bird's entire body, and I could have sworn that somewhere in the distance someone was grumbling.
The Martians threw everything they had at us and then retreated, screaming in terror, as Indigo's fringes assumed the shapes of giant bugs that loped after them. All were specks against the landscape as I took one last glance backward.
Within reach were pieces of tree limbs thrown by our pursuers, and I retrieved two sturdy ones, secured the smallest in the depression back of Bellis' skull and rowed with the other. Obviously we weren't going to sink, and just as clearly Indigo had no plans to devour us.
We were adrift about a week. That first day I worried about Bellis falling asleep and either suffocating or drowning when her beak sank. The fact was it didn't sink at all but lay on top of Indigo as if it weighed nothing at all. Bellis slept, snored and fidgeted during nightmares, and I lay in her deepest sinus, just above her eyes, and hoped she didn't throw me out.
We might have starved if it weren't for the fish that came our way. Bellis used her beak to snatch them out of the blue, then she tossed them in the air and allowed them to drop into her waiting maw. She was greedy and usually snapped at a meal before it completely disappeared. That way, small parts of the food fell aside and I scooped them up for myself. I would have preferred melon to raw fish, and before the week was done I would have chosen anything at all rather than the klufe's leftovers. On the other hand, she became satiated and slovenly, lying gracelessly, shrieking now and then to remind me that I had gotten her into this, gobbling and sleeping, polluting the pristine body under us and making me wish I were a thousand miles away from her.
Eventually we spotted an island, and a day later we reached shore. Exhausted and in a foul mood, I satisfied myself that no Martians or aggressive beasts inhabited the place, and then I settled down for a long rest, well away from Bellis. Once in a while, during the following days, I checked on her to make certain she remained in good health. I didn't go near her as she had decided for some reason that I would look better in a crushed and maimed condition. Unable to fly, she destroyed acres of jungle with her tail as she foraged and bitterly complained to the unsympathetic terrain.
"Shut up!" I would howl, if she were within my hearing, at which point she would shriek with rage and demolish the landscape.
After a while I began crying. For no reason at all I wept, not noisily for hours but quietly, softly and in spurts. I would feel perfectly fine and then gloom would enter my spirit like a cloud crossing the sun, and I'd find a comfortable spot on the beach and allow the tears to slide down my cheeks. The world looked opaque to me during those periods, as if it were a dusty crystal ball into which I peered. No matter how hard I strained my eyes, I saw no place for me, no spot to call home, no special tree beckoning, no portion of sky that I might claim as my own.
After I had been moping about and accomplishing nothing for several weeks, Indigo began grumbling at me. She didn't speak, just heaved herself here and there and sent curling fringes up the beach to touch my toes.
"Let me alone," I said, almost as blue as she. "All along I thought you were a worthy enemy and it turns out you're just another part of Emeroo. If you ask me I think she's the whole shebang and we people are only imagining the universe and the items in it."
Indigo sounded hoarse. Probably it had something to do with her size, or the source of her voice was so far away from me that it was muted, or she might have eaten too many rocks, or the fact could be that I didn't know why or how she did anything. "Don't mistake me for my sister," she said. "For your information, she has been known to tell an untruth."
"How can you speak?"
"Mind link, remember?"
"But I hear you with my ears."
"You only think you do. You could hear me even if you had no ears at all. The sole requirement for conversation with me is a brain. That you have, though a small and insignificant one."
"Tell me about Emeroo," I said.
"You're all alike, noticing only the dominant one. No matter how I grow, she captures fancy. I am everywhere yet I'm the second choice."
"What's the reason for that, do you think?"
"The color. Green is, psychologically, the most restful color to the human mind. Blue, on the other hand, inspires them toward dark thoughts and deeds. What can I do?"
"Don't ask me, I'm already hanging onto existence by my fingernails. Why don't you forget your self-pity for a while and tell me about Emeroo?"
"She bosses me. From the beginning she held me in check. Is it my fault that she has a skimpy appetite? Only rarely does she let go the reins and permit me to advance."
"You say she's your sister?"
"Yes. Indigo and Emeroo. Blue and green. Lovely lasses with huge minds, both old internally but outwardly youthful. The fact is we're fond of one another, but I get irritated when she tells me we're twins. I have a distinct recollection of being around before she was. That's why I said she's been known to tell an untruth."
"There are lots of hidden rooms near your bottom, all kinds of complexes with machines stored in them—"
"Emeroo is a collector. She's also a scholar, thinks she needs to know everything. Every time man invents something interesting, my sister has to have a sample to tuck away in a hiding place."
I asked some more questions, but Indigo stopped talking and wouldn't respond to me anymore, so I went away. At least she had drawn me from my depression and I felt like climbing a tree or something. In a few days I planned to leave the island. The clipped wings of Bellis were growing back and she would soon be normal.
The first place we went was Recreation, but I later wished we hadn't. The Martians were killing everything that crawled. They had hand guns that shot bolts of fire, the balls they tossed exploded, they even had a hose from which gushed such thick foam that when it landed on a bug it held it fast and suffocated it. Bellis and I flew overhead until the Martians started aiming their weapons at us, and then we turned north to look for a place to land. I had made a mistake in leaving the island. We couldn't find it again, perhaps Indigo had eaten it, and the others we located were inhabited by hostiles.
I might have headed for Geba's island subconsciously. Certainly I didn't know where it was with my everyday mind. I must have been thinking she was my best chance since she knew more about me than any Martian. I hadn't forgotten her ill nature, but still I didn't rid myself of the notion that we were of the same species. Blood was thicker than fear and suspicion, or so I thought.
When they killed Bellis I knew the world had come to an end. By some quirk of fate I had been born at a time when reality could not support me. Since then I had been living on borrowed time. That time ran out when Bellis and I flew over Geba's island. By then we were desperate for food and water, and the green oasis was a powerful lure that drew us and finally killed us.
It was my fault. I could have landed on Indigo, thrown the both of us on the mercy of Emeroo who had never refused me any necessity. Out of pettiness and childish anger I had determined to take care of myself and resist any offers.
I never realized how much I loved my klufe until the Martians popped out of the top of a giant tree, trained a long nozzle on us and fired a missile that hit Bellis directly in her big, tough heart. She was dead before her wings dropped, otherwise I knew she would have made every effort to land me safely. Her corpse twisted just enough to dislodge me and throw me away.
The Martians were careful about picking me up. They knew my back was broken and they didn't want me to die before they had an opportunity to do away with me in their own imaginative fashion. Under Geba's supervision they lashed me so securely to a buried post that it imposed no extra strain on my spine. My toes were about fifteen feet off the ground.
It was a favorable spot in which to die, if there was such a place. The area was clear of jungle and brush so that I could easily see the half-mile of distance separating me from Indigo. Behind me was a high rock upon which Geba stood and delivered her oration. It seemed I was a witch possessed of a demon that had the power to control matter. The demon was destroying Earth, it had already destroyed Mars by earthquakes, and now it intended to annihilate the human race. The solution to the problem was to get rid of the demon's host.
I suffered no physical pain because I was paralyzed. No doubt my spinal cord had been severed in the fall. I couldn't feel anything except the heaviness of my eyelids and a headache that would soon blind me. I might as well have had no body at all, for all the sensation I experienced, which was a favor to me since I would shortly be burned alive.
At last Geba had found her true calling as a dictator. She gave a fine speech, increased everyone's blood pressure and blood lust. Science, she said, was all right when you could afford to pay attention to it, otherwise the logical course was superstition. After they murdered me and the demon I harbored, they would destroy all scientific artifacts, which included clothes. They would maintain their identities as Martians but they would learn how to subdue Earth and make her support them. Everyone who wasn't a citizen of their island was henceforth considered to be a mortal enemy. Etcetera.
In the meantime, the brush at the base of my pole was lighted. As for me, I was glad to go. Life had been difficult enough when I had a sound body. I tried to think of someone whom I hated to leave behind, someone I wanted to say good-bye to, but all I could think of were Belios and Bellis. I had never had anyone else since the day the Martians took my mother away from me.
Eventually I refused to look at my persecutors and kept my eyes focused on the sky. Geba especially resented the bad news fate had handed her and so she had become particularly cruel and made sure that her underlings kept the fire going at a slow pace. Occasionally a gust of heat or smoke swept upward but I was unaware of it until it touched my face or blew past me.
They had no musical instruments but had made drums of reeds and leaves. Geba climbed from the rock to stand directly beneath me. I could hear her clearly, and the others danced around the post and chanted Martian truisms.
"Speak!" yelled Geba to me, but I refused. "You'll be burning soon, Earthchild! Leave us your last will and testament!"
Strife, I thought. That's the gift of life to you. Struggling and suffering, winning very little and trying to forget what you did.
"Tell us about the green one!" she yelled. "She's on Mars, the homeland! Tell us. She's no longer on Earth!" Geba's fear made her voice tremble. While I thought of heat and scorched flesh, she thought of Emeroo. Not once had she mentioned Indigo. Perhaps they were simply going to snap their fingers and made the big diner disappear.
I thought I felt something touch my toes and knew the flames were playing there. Determined not to make a sound, I shed a few tears. I was nothing but a coward. If it weren't for the paralysis, I'd be screaming my head off and begging for mercy. More diligently the flames played at my feet Indigo moved at high noon. I didn't want it to happen. What I really wanted to do was die, just as I'd wished to die since Moss had gone away.
Geba would have been better off had she stayed on the rock wall and spouted nonsense. She couldn't climb back upon it without assistance, and Indigo cut off all other escape routes. I could see everything that happened, and never had I seen the blue creature flow so swiftly. As if on signal, she suddenly became flat at her fringes and proceeded to roll toward the clearing, covering the half-mile in a matter of seconds. I stopped watching her just as she reached the Martians. Something green caught my attention.
Emeroo came out of the blue depths like a swimmer walking on water. Green and beautiful, tall and slender and cold of eye and expression, she walked across the flowing Indigo toward the post and stopped. She didn't say anything at first, just stood looking up at me.
Meanwhile Indigo was flowing about the feet of the terrified Martians. Geba was rolled up in a carpet of blue and carried away to the main mass. There were hundreds of Martians in the clearing, and each was wrapped and taken away.
"They'll all die for this," said Emeroo. "The blue carpets are their burial garments. Not one of them on this island will be spared."
It was a long time before Indigo finished her task of dispatching Martians, and then she came after me. She had already smothered the fire. Now she came up the post, gently ate the ropes holding me fast, slid behind me and gathered me in, formed a seat under me and lowered me into the arms of Emeroo.

Chapter XVIII
One day I was standing somewhere on Earth, minding my own business and not doing much of anything, when an archeologist happened along, saw me, and began chipping at me with a sharp stone. He was a fearsome looking creature, naked and hairy and not at all friendly in appearance, but determined he was, and it took him more than an hour to concede that my green exterior was impervious to his attack.
In truth he wasn't all that hairy and fierce. His features were distorted as I looked at him through the stained glass window of Emeroo's body. That was what I called the transparent wall separating me from the outside world. Within it, I was comfortable and secure and usually deep in suspended animation, but occasionally, as when the archeologist stumbled across us, I rose to a state of consciousness.
Emeroo had stood in that one spot for a century, a green woman with an exterior of many glittering facets, and within her, like a twin or a full grown fetus, stood myself. Sometime during the last hundred years my wounds had been healed. The process had gone unnoticed by me until my first waking period, and then when I stretched and stirred I realized I possessed all my faculties.
The archeologist didn't linger, as the area wasn't an amiable one, a host to swampy terrain, howling winds and cloudy skies. Somewhere in the distance, Indigo rolled and swelled and created fierce storms.
Still startled, still wearing his expression of fear, the little man gripped Emeroo's arms and peered intently at me.
Making a face, I said, "Hi, there, son of a Martian."
He couldn't hear me but there was nothing wrong with his vision. Howling and yipping in alarm, he dropped the stone,
flung himself backward and went sloshing away through the swamp.
I wanted to be released to follow him, but Emeroo declined to obey my urgings and complaints by quietly and gently putting me into the deep sleep again.
Time was a matter of silence and the soft gurglings within my body. How many times my shallow breath came and went, or how many sunsets and dawns Emeroo witnessed, I didn't know, but one day I came to full alertness with warm rain pelting my face. Emeroo had left me.
Drenched and chilled, I grabbed the first thing I saw, a soft brown object that felt like an enormous head of human hair. It was fur, but I didn't recognize it since I had seen few mammals other than people.
The sky tried to flatten me with its deluge. Half blinded, I saw a thatched hut close by and crawled into it. The fur was large enough to completely engulf me, and after I assured myself that it wasn't alive, I crawled in and didn't stick my head out until my chills were gone.
Outside, the ground was soaked and unbelievably ugly. There was no jungle or moss, only uneven sod covered with rocks and grass. It was impossible to tell the time of day. The sky bulged with dark clouds and a hot wind shook my hut. Had I stayed inside until the weather cleared, I would have lived my life indoors, for rain was a constant happening these days. Conceivably there were people living who had never seen the sun.
I waited for Emeroo to come and claim me and put me back in the deep freeze. For a while I tested my body to see if a good job had been done on my spine. I felt no pain, weakness or numbness, and my feet showed no signs of having suffered mutilation in the fire.
What was my mental and emotional attitude at that point? The same as always; exasperation was the best description. I was a person who was perpetually interfered with. Nobody ever asked my opinion about anything, no one ever seemed to entertain the idea that I might possess preferences and I hadn't been asked if I wanted to live on a saturated island.
Surrounded on all sides by water, I felt like my normal castaway self. Then one day I found out that my island was afloat and moving. Immediately I began getting seasick. Three-quarters of a mile across, my private piece of property had an orchard of dwarfed fruit, a muk bean grove, a few puny trees and sparse brush, while the rest consisted of rocks and grass with my hut squarely in the center of it all, and with the whole affair sailing through Indigo like a free agent.
I sat on the shore in the rain and dangled my feet in my old acquaintance. She had changed over the years, had grown thin, watery and gray. I wasn't even certain she was still the same entity. She didn't talk, wouldn't answer questions or acknowledge my presence, she hadn't any kind of personality, and once when I accidentally fell into her, she refused to buoy me up and I sank and had to fight my way back up to her surface. Since I had nearly drowned, I was careful thereafter to maintain a solid grip on the land.
"Hi, there," said a voice one day, and I looked up to see Moss walking toward me. He must have come up out of Indigo. I was eating lunch, sitting beside my hut and taking advantage of one of the rare lulls in the rain.
Sitting down, Moss looked at me for a long time. "You aren't saying anything."
I continued to eat. After a while, I said, "I'm not so lonely that I can enjoy the company of a corpse."
He didn't look ridiculous anymore. He still had the same long nose, the same outlandish face and body, but there was nothing inside. Not of him. Of me. He existed in my memory.
"I'm really dead, then?" he said.
I nodded. "You were born when I needed you, "and you were so important I didn't think I could live without you. Then she killed you. She knows all about me, which means she realizes the effect you're having on me."
He leaned over, kissed me on the cheek and went away. I watched him until he disappeared. Not only did Emeroo know all about me, I was beginning to know a few things about her. Moss had come along to cleanse away the few traces of himself that were left in my psyche. A weight had just been lifted from my soul and I needn't feel any more guilt for having loved him. It had been a good love, and a kind that never ended. Moss had been a part of my growth process.
My most valuable artifact was the fur. Rain-resistant, it could hold up for hours in the worst storm and dried easily. I learned how to tack the bottom with splinters and made leggings and socks for my feet. That way I could travel all over the island in any kind of weather and remain comfortable.
Night time was bad for me. I lay in the hut, listening to the rain and thinking of my old Scar and my dead winged friends. I would think of the world as it had been in my infancy, steaming hot, beautiful and savage, and I'd realize it had only been my fancy that made it seem good; fancy and nostalgia. The world actually hadn't been fit to live in for a long time before I came along.
I became a proficient fisher, using a vine with a bent root and a worm. It took me too long to learn how to make a fire, but cooking made eating more pleasurable. Since I wasn't too quick to believe in accidents where my own life was concerned, I didn't know what to think when I fished up the blue woman.
For two days I had been hearing groans. Someone far away was complaining in a squeaky voice. The rain prevented me from seeing the horizon, not that there was anything to see besides water, but I kept a constant vigil for two days, stood on shore and peered out at gray mist. Finally I fell asleep in exhaustion, and when I woke up I saw something thrashing in the water a dozen yards away.
She was so weak she could scarcely take hold of the limb I tossed to her. After she took hold of it, I hauled on the vine and brought her ashore. Kneeling beside her and staring down at her beautiful face, I knew I was looking at Indigo. For the first time, I saw what she really was like. Except for her color, she was an exact replica of Emeroo.
"That isn't your natural shape," I said to her later. She lay beside the fire, wrapped in my fur. At the moment, it wasn't raining.
So weak she could scarcely make herself heard, she said, "What do you mean?"
"Don't you know? Don't you remember?"
"I remember nothing. I believe I've had a tremendous nightmare."
"What you've had was a terrific eating binge."
Her face screwed up as if she were going to cry. "You're upsetting me and I don't know why. I don't feel very well. I want to cease to exist."
I fed her some fish and then she had a little fruit juice. "Thank you so much," she said. "Now if I might just sleep a little."
"I didn't know you slept. I thought—oh, never mind, go ahead and rest"
She was so beautiful, and she seemed so colorful in my drab world of grays. She had a decided aversion to the ocean and always sat with her back to the visible portion. About all she did those first few days was rest and eat.
"The food is good! I'll have seconds and thirds and fourths, if you don't mind."
"I do mind," I said. "You get one portion only."
Pouting, she drew up her long legs and frowned at me.
"You need some clothes," I said. "How about some like mine? There's a thistle grove not far away and we can pick the down and make you something nice and warm to protect you from night chill."
"I'm over my initial shock," she said, scorn in her tone. "I don't suffer from the temperature. Evidently you think we're alike."
"No, but hospitality should be met with gratitude, no matter how unnecessary it is."
Often I went down to the beach, looked out at the ocean, reminded myself that it was probably Indigo's excess poundage, and then I laughed and laughed. Someone had separated the mass from the original body, or vice versa, and I could have made a good guess as to that someone's identity. Emeroo had decided it was time to interfere with the blue one's gluttony.
"You have a secret," said a cold voice behind me. "I hate secrets. I don't know how I know that, but it's true." hope you're in a friendly frame of mind then, otherwise your "One of these days you're going to remember everything. I sister had better be close by or I might be in trouble."
"I have no sister. There's only myself. In fact, I believe you're an illusion."
"No, you have a sister, and I'm real."
My words seemed to disturb her and she didn't pursue the subject. No matter how I tried, I couldn't make a friend of her. Probably I never could have. She wasn't human and she wasn't loving enough to pretend to be tolerant of my ways.
"Where is your power?" she said. "This inferior piece of land is merely floating aimlessly in all that ugly water and I don't like it. Make it stop."
"What kind of power do you have in mind?" I said, wondering if she was beginning to remember what she was.
"I don't know." She rubbed her temples with long fingers.
"What's wrong with me? Why can't I remember anything? Why do I feel so dazed and sluggish?"
Another time, she said, "There's something about you that annoys me. You're important, aren't you?" Before I could reply, she continued. "Of course you aren't. I can't see why anyone would be impressed with a human child."
Something about me depressed her. She thought it might be my green eyes. I told her my eyes were brown and she went into a noisy tirade concerning her superiority and my inferiority. Her senses were infallible, or so she claimed, particularly her eyesight. My eyes were green which was a color she had always disliked.
Her presence often startled me, even when I went to look for her, fully expecting to find her. I would discover her standing at the ocean's edge and marvel at her brilliance, or she would suddenly enter my hut and turn its walls from gray to blazing blue. Compliments rolled off her back as quickly as insults, so confident was she. Only her confusion outweighed her immodesty. She couldn't even remember her name.
"Does Indigo ring a bell?" I said. "Not one whit." "How about Emeroo?"
"That sounds green and I would never tolerate anyone calling me that. You know, I believe I'm beginning to recall a very peculiar and unpleasant associate, a gross individual who had a giant case of indigestion ... or was I ... I won't think about it another moment. How can I be expected to be logical when someone had inflicted brain damage upon me? That's it! I was struck with a blunt instrument. Right here." She touched a finger to a blue curl on her forehead. "No, not there. It was at the back of my head. Or was it closer to my stomach?"
"I like you this way," I said, smiling. "You're innocent" "Don't be offensive. You know you mean ignorant" She wouldn't go and gather fruit though she was much more interested in food than I. "Something is wrong with me," she said. "The fruit on this island is delicious yet I can only eat one or two pieces of it at any given time. For instance, right now I'd prefer to eat all of this melon, but I can't bring myself to open it."
"One time I was on Mars. That's one of the lights in the sky. There was a library and I read about something called post hypnotic suggestion, not that I think you've been hypnotized, but I suspect someone green has been suggesting to your mind that you eat no more than your share."
"What are you talking about?" she said.
"You don't need food to stay alive. You eat it because you like the taste."
"You're ignorant, uneducated and pesty," she said, and then looked surprised. "That came from the back of my mind! What makes you think I don't need food? Everything that lives eats."
I still didn't think she required anything like food or conversation to remain healthy. Whether she knew it or not, she was practically self-sufficient, had to be if she were a sister to Emeroo.
The island began to bore her. "I have no intention of staying on this portion of mud. How do I get off?" "Swim."
"You're perfectly aware that I don't even want to look at that water let alone immerse myself in it." She took to tramping from shore to shore and tip to tip, staring out at the ocean, forcing herself to acknowledge its existence, becoming accustomed to it. "I'm expecting someone to come and get me," she said to my unspoken question.
One day she came hurrying back to the hut to fetch me. She had seen something moving on the horizon. Since she was in good spirits, I didn't tell her it was probably just an ocean swell. For a change the sky wasn't leaking and the mist was unusually thin so there was a clear view. Indigo had indeed seen something but it was too far away to make out All I could tell was that it was big.
That evening I went to bed but she stayed on the beach in order to catch first glimpse of the floating object at daybreak. Probably she didn't need sleep anyway but had merely been doing it to mimic me and to occupy her time. At any rate, it was dawn and raining when she returned in disgust and disappointment "It's only another island."
"Is that all?" I was out of bed with a bound and running down to the beach. Never having seen a floating island and in spite of the fact that I happened to be stranded on one, I didn't intend to miss the show.
It was much larger than mine and it was inhabited. To me, the people on it were Martians, though such had never actually existed, or at least not to my knowledge. Acquainted only with Earthmen, the figures scurrying back and forth on the moving chunk of sod were nevertheless Martians to my mind.
Sticking out of the rear of the island were two long wooden rails on which were seated hundreds of oarsmen who were so proficient that they could maneuver their little world wherever they pleased. Also they had good ears and heard the signals relayed to them via drum beats.
Most island jobs were full-time, as I discovered later. One such was held by the spotter who shinnied up a vertical post every morning and took a seat on the top. She kept watch for anything that moved on the water. The island was called Stony Hill. Its deaf inhabitants were completely out of all action as most information was conveyed by drams.
The islanders were going to kill me until they saw Indigo. I hadn't often enjoyed good luck with members of my species and anticipated that these samples would hate me on sight. I was almost correct. They were afraid of me on sight, but since they outnumbered me about five thousand to one and their lookouts had reported seeing no one else, they forged ahead through the choppy water and rammed my sod.
Two huge, sharp-pronged roots served as anchors. Attached to bowed posts, the roots were released when the vines that held them were cut. They flew onto my sod, dug into the mud and secured ropes held my island to theirs.
The king rarely did anything but sit on his throne on the foremost peak of Stony Hill and give orders. He also ate a good deal more than he needed. Among other things, he was offended when I sometimes didn't wear any clothes, and left strict instructions with his personal attendant that I wasn't to be allowed out of my hut in a state of undress. The attendant was mean and spiteful and pinched me whenever he could.
Indigo could have made life easier for me, but she was vain and immature and spent her time bargaining with Sten for his throne.
"She favors you somewhat, but she isn't exactly one hundred percent for you, so I may yet get her permission to throw you into the ocean," he said to me.
"Why do you want to do that?"
"Obviously because you're offensive."
"How so?"
"There isn't anything wrong with being short as long as everyone is that way."
"It isn't my fault if your ancestors were gutless and ran off to Mars."
He didn't know what Mars was but he recognized an insult when he heard one. "For that you take the job of spotter tomorrow."
"Maybe you'll explain something to me. I know you think I'm a freak, but why persecute me more than Indigo when we both know she's much more of a freak?"
"While we're very much afraid of her, we're only a little afraid of you. Understand?"
Because the sky was cloudy was no reason to believe it might be benign. Hundreds of feet up and sitting in a hard hole in the post, I felt as if I were touching the sun. Once when I hadn't the strength to climb down at sunset, Sten ordered me left up there, probably hoping I'd fall.
"I hate heights," I said to him later. "I hope you understand I'll not go up there."
"For raising your voice to me, you take the job of galley slave tomorrow."
That was as bad as spotting, or even worse. Straddling a post, with my legs dangling all day in rough water, made for unbelievable bruises.
"It's time you got your memory back," I said to Indigo. "Your sister sent you here so that we could both learn a lesson."
"How do you know that?"
"It's the only reason she ever does anything!" I yelled. I had been doing a good deal of yelling lately. "Sten may turn his throne over to me." "What do I care?" "Don't yell."
"If his stupid chair means that much to you, simply go over there, haul him out of it and sit in it!" "What if he objects?"
"You're three times his size, and the others are all scared out of their wits at the sight of you. Say, listen, is it possible you're Emeroo's infant sister? Sometimes you act as if you were born yesterday."
Sten was really out to get me after that because Stony Hill now had two monarchs who sat side by side on the foremost peak.
"I asked her if she'd mind if I skewered you and she said she abhorred the sight of blood," he said to me.
"Then you can't do it out of her sight because, as you well know, she can see through the ground and rocks."
"True." He pulled his lower lip and eyed me with treacherous brown orbs. "Where does she come from?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
"Where do you come from?"
"About one or two thousand years in your past."
"One thing, you tell the biggest lies I ever heard. Personally I believe you're a freak and her slave, and I believe she injured her head. Also, I wish we had never spotted this island."
He wasn't worried about sailing off the end of the world. "Quit lying," he said to me one day. "You think I'm so foolish I believe there's an end to everything? I'm twenty-four years old and have been sailing every second of it, but never have we found an edge or anything. There's nothing but water, sky and islands."
"Then why not stop? Why not drop a lot of anchors in the water and stay in one place?"
"And miss the fights?"
"What fights?"
"The ones we have when we meet other islands."

Chapter XIV
My island was used as a battering ram in the war, not that it turned out to be a particularly successful ploy, for the enemy anticipated it and had nothing important situated on the foremost tip of their sod. I didn't get to see the meeting, doing galley duty as I was, and I didn't hear much either since I had to keep my ears tuned to the drum beat. I could have broken cadence, or even dropped my oar and stopped working altogether, but then the woman in front of me and the man in back would have tried to knock me in the water, and there was no way up the high banks onto solid ground.
Stony Hill didn't get its name for nothing. A high wall of rocks had been built in front of Sten's throne while several more had been constructed on my island. The enemy didn't board us for two days, just stood on their sod and looked at the rock walls. In the meantime, I put in my stint at the oars and was finally relieved, so I was free and available as a target when we were invaded. As a matter of fact, so were all the other oarsmen. Sten figured correctly that the enemy king would keep his oars working in order to maintain his position against us. That meant we didn't have to do the same thing, and so we had several hundred more soldiers.
The enemy king turned out to be a queen who was carried about in a covered throne. Her slaves wore wooden armor. The skinny old monarch talked to her troops with a drum. Only her head was visible, sticking out between two curtains as she stayed well back of the fighting.
Our army used bows and arrows, theirs was fond of sling shots, and it soon became obvious that they were more interested in smashing huts than in hitting individual soldiers. Since the children were in the huts, our people kept breaking ranks to go and check on their families.
"I think you'd better get out there and stop all this," I said to Indigo.
"What on Earth can I be expected to do?" She was in Sten's hut, a fact that enraged him because it was the best on Stony Hill. She had set up housekeeping there and he couldn't bear her glittering presence and had moved elsewhere. Anway, now she languished and picked at various pieces of fruit. Her expression was bored and irritable.
"You can show yourself," I said. "That ought to be good for something."
"But I'm resting, can't you see?"
"You've done nothing else since the day I fished you from your own fat."
"I resent that and I wouldn't repeat it if I were you." "Emeroo, where are you?" I yelled.
"Don't do that!" cried Indigo, sitting up in alarm. "I don't like it when you call that name. It gives me chills."
"I think she'll give you more than that if you don't end this war. People are getting hurt out there."
"It's the human way of life. Let them fight."
"I'm human and I don't want to fight. I'll call Emeroo."
"Oh, all right," she said, "I'll go out, but that's all."
The residents of Stony Hill were getting their pride knocked out of them. It seemed that big sling shots, loaded with sharp rocks, were more devastating than arrows. Somehow I didn't think Emeroo had left me to be killed in a war, nor did I think she had left me to get along as best I could with savages. Indigo was supposed to have appeared and showed me her true colors, which things she had done. I knew she was immature, greedy, lazy, selfish, stupid, all the things that Emeroo was not. Like alter egos, one of them was strong and the other weak.
The blue alien did some devastating of her own. Sten's hut was on the left rear beach of Stony Hill, and Indigo and I no sooner stepped outside than we were shot at by the enemy, and not from a distance, but close up. That was how far the invasion had advanced.
Debris flew over our heads. One soldier raised his slingshot while another took a firmer grip on her club. Then they both saw Indigo. The first one ran to the ocean and jumped in, the other went down on her knees and covered her head with her arms.
"You humans are not at all entertaining," Indigo said to her. "You have brains but you don't use them, you have bodies but you don't take care of them."
The woman went down fiat on her belly, buried her face in the dirt.
"All you care about is the present," said Indigo. "You know, mind over matter is really what it's all about, but you won't listen."
Whimpering, the woman crawled away, her weapons abandoned. A Stony Hill resident happened along and knocked her in the head.
Indigo stopped to pat some frightened children on the head. A boulder, catapulted from the enemy's island, sang through the air and bounced off her blue crown. "That's annoying," she said, her countenance cold and forbidding, and several enemies who were nearby went down on their bellies to sob and grovel.
It was much later when she said to me, "Do you think this is the right place for me?"
"At least for the time being."
"Do you want a massage, or a foot warmer, or how about a human rug to walk on?" It was the skinny old queen who said it, dethroned and humbled and cowed by the blue woman.
"I don't benefit from massages, and I have no desire to walk on your miserable flesh," said Indigo. "Don't make such offers to me again, if you please."
"Yes, master."
Sten didn't like the way things were headed.
"It's the only way to have peace," I told him. "Indigo as ruler means that everybody lays down his weapons."
"We needed some wives and husbands, and we planned to get them after this battle."
"Ask for them."
Sten reacted as if it was an unpleasant thought that had never occurred to him. "Did you ever hear of rights and freedom?" When I nodded, he said, "If this keeps up, we're all going to forget we ever knew anything about them. That blue woman isn't right in the head. She can't govern us and you know it"
Elda, the skinny old queen, took up residence in the hut next to Sten's. No one dared fight because that always meant they would be brought before the curtained box where Indigo resided.
"The blue one says she wants her old island all to herself," said Sten to me. "As her throne. We're going to fix it up real nice for her and you."
"Who's going to?"
"Me and Elda."
"You two are becoming fast friends, eh?"
He scratched his nose. "Sometimes it pays to be friendly with your enemies."
I didn't know what he meant, and I didn't trust him. To Indigo, I said, "He's up to something."
"Who cares? None of them can do anything. I've finally discovered where I truly belong. I was created to rule. Have they gotten rid of all the weapons?"
"Yes."
"Fine. Now I want you to tell them that I insist their filthy huts be torn down and thrown into the ocean. They'll build new ones, and men and women will live apart."
"What about families?"
"Didn't you hear me? Well have order in my kingdom. Men and women fuss when they live together. We'll have no contention while I'm around."
One night she wasn't around anymore. I wasn't around, either. They got rid of us. Sten, Elda and their people had had their fill of their new queen.
They built Indigo a fine hut on my little island, and since the blue one hated the dark and didn't want to be alone, she made me sleep on the ground outside, which was what Sten and Elda had hoped for. They simply cut all the anchors holding my island to them and left us to drift away.
Morning came and Indigo was incensed. "We'll go after them. Each and every citizen will be punished."
"We'll never see them again. Forget it."
"I have a strange suspicion that you planned this!" Glaring at me, she said, "Did you?"
"You're trying to scare the wrong person, but the fact is, I didn't want to stay with them. I'll bet that right now they're continuing their war. They'd rather fight than talk."
"You wouldn't be happy with them?"
"I liked them but I felt no kinship to them. Probably it was my fault. I don't think I'm related to anyone or anything. Living with aliens, I've become alien."
"Don't say that!" she said sharply.
It took her a while to become convinced that Sten, Elda and their earthen worlds were on a different course than our own. After that she began to be quite regal in her behavior toward me, mentioned it might be a good idea if I cleaned her hut every day, gathered in a supply of food for her, brought regular weather reports, kept a constant lookout for floating islands and talked her to sleep every night. She didn't seem interested in the fact that none of those things were really necessary for her. She didn't need shelter, food or sleep, and the weather plus the whereabouts of other islands were only minor curiosities to her.
She sulked when I didn't express enthusiasm at her suggestions. "Why shouldn't I rale if I have the power?" she said.
"Power doesn't justify it or even make it necessary."
"You've been talking to idealists!" she said, shrilly.
"Just one. She's green. You can apply your idea to other situations. For instance, why not eat yourself into a state of omni-presence, if you're able to do it? Of course, you won't know any more than if you had remained a small mass, you won't have any more power and you might even enjoy your existence a little bit less, but what the devil, if you have the ability to spread out all over, go ahead and do it."
"You're growing tiresome."
"Good," I said, and went to the other side of the island and began building a raft.
"What are you doing?" She had come after me to see why I hadn't returned.
"I'm not going to be cared for by you any longer. You don't own me."
"What are you talking about?"
I stood up but she still towered over me. "Emeroo?" I said into her frozen blue face. "Indigo?" Her expression never changed, her eyes failed to flicker. "I don't know whether there are two of you or not," I said. "I don't know who you are, but I know I'm finished with you. Maybe there's no place anywhere for me, but you're not going to run things anymore. I'm sixteen years old but I'm never made an important decision of my own."
"Are you sure you're capable of making one?"
"That's the prime thing about being an individual. You have an opportunity to make your choices."
"Certainly, but there are ramifications here—"
"Never mind. You keep showing up, or somebody does, and then I'm introduced to either a completely new Earth or some bloodthirsty aborigines, or both, but never have I been asked what I wanted."
"What do you want?"
"To be left alone."
I was angry the day I sailed away on my raft. For one thing, steering wasn't as easy as I had anticipated. I was using an oar left over from the battle of the floating islands, but there was only my strength to support and guide it, and it kept slicing ineffectively through the water. For another thing, I was angered by the sight of Indigo standing on the shore and waving to me. Distance meant nothing to Emeroo. No mass or space could prevent her from traveling to or being wherever she pleased. My little raft and the listless ocean around me could never get me away.
Raising a fist, I shouted, "Let me alone! Don't follow me! Don't even think about me! Just forget I'm alive!"
Approximately ten hours later, I huddled on the raft, shivering and blubbering.
"Emeroo, where are you? Don't let me die! I didn't mean what I said. Come and save me."
Whoever would have imagined the sea could become such a raging maniac? Not I, else I'd have remained within the humiliating safety of Indigo's presence. The water around me was black, trimmed with gray froth. As for the sky, it was the shade of lead, the exact same color as my mind and heart. My stupidity had doomed me as surely as if I had cut my throat.
The raft might as well have been a splinter. The only thing good about it was that it occasionally floated on top of the water, when it wasn't two feet under with me hanging on and yelling my head off. Whoever would have believed the ocean had no respect for me or anything else? For some ignorant reason I had thought the heaving body was sentient and not a mindless mass. It couldn't talk, it couldn't hear or think, all it did was roll out of control, sweeping me along like a missile one moment, hurling me skyward or three feet under in the next.
Terrifying me more than anything was the sound. What a roar the ocean made as it conspired to kill me! In on the conspiracy was the gray sky that frequently flashed with lightning and dumped more water on me. So I clung to the raft, wept tears of sincere repentance and bellowed for the only friend I had in the world.
She answered. It made me angrier than I'd ever been. Instead of rearing up out of the ocean like a mermaid and gathering me to safety, she stood somewhere in the far distance and told me where to find her.
"I can't do anything with this raft!" I screamed. "Can't you understand that I'm about to be killed?"
There was no answer. No echoes sounded in my head, no gentle but infuriating voice told me anything, no one in the universe cared that I was frightened out of my wits. The raft tilted as a giant watery hand lifted it and tossed it into an empty well that hastily filled. Again we were tossed. I could hear the contents of my belly sloshing about and knew that if I swallowed one more spoonful of ocean, I'd vomit. I did, and I did, but hadn't time to feel relieved as the ocean chose that moment to scramble aboard the raft and tore off my clothes. If I didn't drown, I would soon freeze.
"I can't steer!" I shrieked into the wind. "I can't do anything. Help!"
By the time my circumstances changed for the better, I was in no condition to be appreciative. My fingernails were broken off, likewise my toenails. My left wrist was bent at a strange angle and the skin had turned purple. I hung onto the raft by digging my toes and fingers into gaps between the strips of wood. My face was bloody from having been pounded against them; my body was a mass of bruises. Only my voice remained unimpaired, and I used it to let Emeroo and the universe know what I thought of the general shape of reality.
The raft beached so hard on the floating island that I was thrown clear, and I swam several yards through sand before realizing I was aground.
"I'm sick of your lessons!" I gasped, coming to a halt at Emeroo's green feet. "Did it ever occur to you that you can't always be right? It's against statistics."
"Do you want to go back out on the water?"
Probing for a wad of sand impacted in my throat, I said, "If it's all the same to you I'll take comfort and safety; for the time being."
The trouble with knowing Emeroo was that her presence stimulated my conscience. First I'd fear that she wouldn't judge me fairly, and then I'd fear that she would. At any rate it was a long time before I again saw the light of day. I never learned why she sometimes cared for me in the incubator of her human-shaped body and at other times built a cave and fitted me into a niche to take the deep sleep. This time it was the cave, and I cried as she gave me the cold touch.
"I think I'd rather die! What kind of life is this?"
She didn't hush me, or say anything, simply laid a linger against my forehead, and my mind took a slow and gentle trip into the unknown where I didn't even dream.
She was always exact about waking me up, never left me to stagger about in bewilderment, wondering where I was and what had happened to me. She might as well have dumped me into ice water.
This time I tumbled out onto the ground, howling because it was so cold. The panorama of my world made me speechless. Never could I recall having seen it more desolate than this. It looked dead. On the mud beside me was a fur coat which I climbed into, and then I walked a short distance from the cave to look at my environment. Naturally it was hostile.
The ocean had receded and left swamps in its place. At least the sky was clear and sunny, but it was cold, almost as bad as Mars at dusk. Between spongy pools of mud were thin strips of solid ground and I began walking on one to see where it would take me.
As far as I could see, the world was an unattractive place, populated no doubt by people who were short, savage and unfriendly. I found one interesting object sticking out of a deep swamp. It was the front end of one of the old Martian spaceships. For amusement I found entrance through a small side door and examined the interior. It appeared untouched. A fine layer of dust lay over the walls and seats, but there was no sign of decay. The metal was still smooth and dark, still fine and cold to the touch. For further amusement I tipped the rods of liquid until the circle ran continuously, waited forty-five minutes until the engines came alive. Where would I send it? I chose Mars, pressed the raised image.
Smiling wryly, I left the craft and closed the door. The machine had been made for the skies beyond this little patch of blue and so that was where it would go in a week's time.
I shouldn't have done it, never should have gone into that ship, and especially I shouldn't have ordered its destination, because from the moment I did, I couldn't stop brooding about it. Emeroo had evicted me only temporarily and only because it was necessary. Suspended animation worked fine, but not perfectly. Once in a while I had to put my faculties to work, had to walk about, breathe, eat and think, which was always getting me into trouble.
A pitiful orchard with runted fruit sat beyond a wide, deep swamp. I tried to make a bed in one of the trees but couldn't tolerate it. The top was no more than fifty feet off the ground and I couldn't trust a tree that short. However I could eat its yield which were little yellow items that tasted sour and were tough to chew. They gave me indigestion.
The mushroom grove was better than the orchard. The food was more palatable and the large bushes were soft and thick enough to sleep on. I was shocked and amazed to find a miniscule beast on a mushroom that resembled Nawhana, the giant scarab, except that the tiny one was brown and cowardly.
I didn't exactly cry for my mother, though I wished I could have wept buckets without feeling childish and silly. Especially did I need an emotional outlet when I saw a pair of yellow eyes staring at me out of the darkness one night. After that I slept in a tree, no matter that it was short and didn't afford me much protection. It had to be better than the hut I made from fruit tree leaves.
The fruit continued to give me problems so I stopped eating it altogether and relied on mushrooms and tender roots. Always I kept a lookout for something that possessed yellow eyes and moved swiftly and silently.
Perhaps I would have been better off had my old curiosity arisen inside me. Exploring couldn't have resulted in total failure. At least I might have discovered a better food source. One thing was certain, though I didn't enjoy the thought of returning to the cave of sleep, neither did I want to be abroad in the world. It had changed so much that only the sky was recognizable.
Sometimes I didn't know my own mind, or rather my subconscious was often too clever for the rest of me to keep up with it. Exactly one week from the day that I had prepared the spaceship for flight, I just happened to be walking in the area, not doing anything important, Only meandering haphazardly and muddling through my thoughts. The fact that the fur lay nearby on the ground, bulging with all kinds of food, also seemed irrelevant. The ship must have made a slight movement, preparatory to its take-off, because a loud sucking noise originated in the mud enveloping its lower half. I turned toward the machine and suddenly I knew my previous actions had been no accident, knew I wasn't going to stay where I was and have my life consist of nothing but dreamless naps and brief and frightening interludes of solitary activity. I was going on a real journey.

Chapter XX
"Foolish child!" sounded a voice in my head, and that inspired me to move. Did I love Emeroo more than anything? Would I hate to leave her? The answer to both questions was, of course, and I had to get into the ship quickly because I was no match for her in anything. Grabbing up the laden fur, dragging it through the swamp, I ripped open the small door and scrambled inside mere moments before the craft rid itself of its mud fastenings and lazily ascended skyward.
I ate fruit and mushrooms, dried out because I hadn't enough liquids, suffered from ennui and homesickness, and I sprawled in a passenger seat most of the time. I had found a button that caused a panel in the ship's nose to slide back, thus I was afforded a view of the stars through a window. It had been daylight when I left Earth. Out here it was like being in a sky full of inky shadows through which huge lights tried to peep through.
I slept a good deal of the trip and was, in fact, sound asleep when the ship landed.
For an adventurer, I wasn't very lucky. Mars no longer had anything to recommend it. The complexes and gardens built by the colonists so many millennia ago were all gone. Not so much as a splinter of steel remained, all of it having either dropped into an abyss or having been pulverized in the explosions. The atmosphere was completely gone and I was compelled to do my viewing from the inside of the ship.
My stomach complaining, I recalled the canneries and their hot and steamy air so redolent with food smells. It saddened me to think that the library was destroyed. Along with those reels of film had gone the history of Earth and its people.
Nostalgia forced me to reassess the Martians and I concluded that Geba and her ilk hadn't been so bad after all.
Perhaps they hadn't known how to make a stranger feel welcome but at least their existence had cut into my loneliness.
So much for my journey into the unknown. Mars was as dead as she had ever been. No one would live here, not ever, unless mankind again rose to power in the far future and migrated for a second try.
Where to go and what to do? Pressing problems. Physically, I wasn't doing so well without a goodly supply of water. Mentally I was in even worse shape. Where to go?
Venus was supposed to be too hot for anyone or anything, so I decided to go to Jupiter. Just like that No deliberating or even considering the fact that I would probably die of dehydration before the ship arrived on the big planet. It was quite possible that Jupiter was nothing but gas. In my mind's eye I saw myself and the craft coasting through the giant world like a raft through a fog. Nevertheless I pressed the Jupiter image, gave a last look at desolate Mars and went to sleep in my favorite passenger seat.
I believe the ship's engine was constructed in such a way that the journey to any body in the solar system required only seven days of travel. In a way it was confusing to me to think that faster than light travel to Jupiter was faster than, say, to Venus or Mars.
At any rate, Jupiter wasn't made of gas. It was as solid as a rock with good air, water and a few other necessities. After I revived, I couldn't believe my eyes.
Something happened to the viewing screen a few hours before landing, but it didn't matter to me as more than two weeks with only fruit and mushrooms for a diet had taken its toll and I wasn't seeing too clearly. I wasn't even aware of the touchdown.
Sometime during the night I was aware that I lay with my head out the ship's door so that rain could hit me in the face. Finally awake, I wasted not another moment but rolled over backward and tumbled out onto soggy ground. It wasn't a very intelligent thing to do as the ship conceivably could have landed on a precipice. As it was, my action caused me to drop two feet into a puddle which I proceeded to drink. Not being a scientist, or even momentarily rational, I didn't worry about alien microbes, poisonous air or hostile aborigines.
Jupiter wasn't exactly hot but at least it didn't rain too often and there were attractive deserts and exotic fruits growing at the tops of tall, skinny trees. Away in the distance were dark green mountains while all around me were scattered little grass shacks that told me I'd landed in someone's camp.
Even before I saw the shacks I knew there were people here. The rising sun afforded me a clear view of everyone. They were all around me, on their knees. Jovians were short and underfed-looking. They didn't bathe often enough and they possessed a plethora of weapons.
My name was Reee, and I told them so. I also told them that I was sorry for having landed my ship in their back yard, that it would go away to Mars in a week's time, and that they needn't worship me just because I was unusual.
I never did learn their language, but I found a friend in Lodo who escorted me to the best shack in the area and who accompanied me everywhere. He was small and wiry and generous, offering me all kinds of clothes that I couldn't wear. One of his people had a glandular problem and required clothing larger than the average, so I was outfitted with pants and shirt that were still so tight I could scarcely breathe in them.
The Jovians obviously didn't believe me when I told them, in sign language, that I had come from the sky. They laughed and laughed when I drew the solar system in the sand and indicated that Earth was my origin. Evidently I was the most entertaining thing that had ever happened to them.
Living with them became tedious as they kept falling on their knees whenever I came in sight. Too many times I didn't see them do this and tripped over them. Their demeanor wasn't especially sadistic but they put much faith in long, thin whips, and someone was usually getting the lash because of real or imagined offenses to my person.
"I'm only Reee!" I said to their councilmen, indignant and anxiety-ridden because some poor wretch was taking a beating on my account.
The council was made up of little men and women who had a tendency to shudder in my presence. They nodded their heads at my complaints and then kissed the ground before me.
Lodo took me hunting far out in the desert where the sand wolf lived. I named the beasts myself. They bore a faint resemblance to creatures I had seen on film in the library on Mars, though the Jovian specimens were much uglier and more fierce. Lodo was proficient enough with a sling shot to stand in the center of a circle of attacking wolves and hold them at bay. He did that the first time I hunted with him, and while he did it I stood still and did a world of screaming in my head. I couldn't believe my eyes. There were seven huge wolves trying to get to us and rip us apart and Lodo stood quite calmly and shot stones that beat them back.
He gave one black beast two or three missiles for every one the others received, and when the pack decided to retreat the black one didn't go with them. A final missile, aimed squarely below an ear, felled it and then Lodo cut its throat.
They beat him with the whip for having offended me. They stuffed themselves on the wolfs flesh but, in spite of my protests, punished the hunter. Tying him to a post in the public square, they smiled at me and cut his back to ribbons. I couldn't tell them that I hadn't seen very many mammals in my time, and I had never seen a throat cut before, so naturally I'd been shocked by Lodo's acts. I couldn't tell them any of that, couldn't explain a single thing, and I suspected it wouldn't have made any difference anyhow. Lodo had made me unhappy and so they beat the daylights out of him.
I stopped trusting him when he bore me no malice for what happened, not that I was so jaded I couldn't appreciate a forgiving heart, but his behavior didn't fit in with that of his brethren. They weren't forgiving of one another, and Lodo didn't seem any better or worse than they, except that he was in my company more and wasn't so worshipful when we were alone.
At any rate, I didn't trust him all the way, took to watching him and the others with a more malignant eye. That is, after I first attempted an escape.
They weren't holding me prisoner, nor were they doing anything vaguely like it. They didn't need to. In every direction was what seemed to be endless desert. I went north because Lodo had indicated that no wolves roamed there. I discovered why. The temperature was too high even for me. My two gallons of water lasted less than a day and a little while after I collapsed the Jovians came and picked me up and carried me back to camp.
"I didn't really want to leave," I said later to Lodo. "I'm lucky to have found Earth-type humans and wolves anywhere on this planet, and I don't feel like hunting for the same thing in some other spot, but I find the habits of your people hard to tolerate."
He said nothing, only smiled and applied grease to his sore back.
"Teach me your language," I said. "How can I get along if I can't talk to you?"
I tried to coax him to make marks in the sand for me but he smiled some more and went away.
Every day the Jovians walked into the desert to work on their project. It was a strange kind of building, made of brick and mortar, and judging from the size of the base I could tell the finished project would be huge. Everyone in good health from the age of ten and up worked on the building while the lame, the ill and the old took care of meals. In a way it reminded me of Mars.
I discovered that the present project wasn't the only monolith the Jovians had built. They were scattered all over the desert, miles apart. No one would tell me how many there were. I was hiking with Lodo one afternoon when I found one. From a distance it looked like my old Scar and for a moment I forgot I was no longer on Earth.
The monolith was about one hundred feet high, fifty feet wide and twenty feet deep, a solid block of stone that seemed as useful as a sand dune. I walked all around it several times before curiosity compelled me to begin digging at the base of the north wall. Lodo began yelling and shaking his head, suddenly became very agitated, threw himself at my feet and wept. By then I was accustomed to such behavior on his and everyone else's part so I ignored him and kept digging. The sand grew hard, my fingers grew sore, yet I persisted in gouging at the ground, perhaps hoping to find home or some such nonsense, when a pair of guards came along to take us back to camp.
Evidently I had desecrated something sacred and since the Jovians didn't want to punish me, they tied Lodo to the same post in the center of the village and gave him another beating.
I had no chance to comfort him or even to see him. The next day the guards wouldn't let me out of my shack but blocked the doorway with their bodies. They weren't stupid but it might not have occurred to them that they couldn't confine me if I didn't wish it. That is, they couldn't very well expect me to obey if they weren't prepared to back up their intent with force. I simply shoved them out of the way and went looking for Lodo. He was nowhere in the village and I suspected they had taken him to the recuperating center which was a small oasis two miles north where only the very sick were cared for. If the patient recovered, he or she came back, otherwise they were left on the sand for the wolves.
Since I wouldn't stay in my shack voluntarily, they left me alone to go where I pleased, not that there were a great many choices. Without Lodo my existence was a lonely one for no other Jovian would associate with me. I believe they were so undeviating in their ways that Lodo would have had to die before they assigned someone else to me. They rarely changed their minds about anything. Boredom rapidly set in and I regretted having sent the spaceship away to Mars.
The exhilaration of being a god had its limitations that were reached for me before I had even set foot on the planet. People were continually worshipping me or trying to murder me. All my life it had been so.
The Jovians worked like maniacs on their new monolith, they ate wolf meat, desert cactus and fruit as if the supply was unlimited and they treated me like a queen. Nearly everything I learned about them was acquired from my own observations, as they almost seemed to go out of their way to prevent me from picking up the language. They were a nomadic people, which accounted for the monoliths scattered everywhere. They stayed in one area long enough to build one of their sticks of bricks and then they packed up their children and belongings and found a fresh patch of sand and sky.
There came a day when they didn't want me around the project anymore. Since that was what they wanted, I saw to it that their desire was thwarted. They never laid a finger on me.
In the Martian library I had seen a picture of the remains of an ancient Earth pyramid, said to be many thousands of years old. The remains consisted of two crumbled walls and some collapsed caverns. The Jovian monolith reminded me of the old pyramid. Inside were a myriad of tunnels that appeared to double back on themselves and that seemed to serve no purpose. There were carvings and paintings on the inner walls of wolves, Jovians and images that looked startlingly like myself. The building and its pictures would last a long time. Maybe they were the Jovians' way of writing their history. Unfortunately for me, I had no real understanding of any of it.
Naturally the monolith was intended to be my crypt. From the moment they first set eyes on me they had marked me as their project's occupant. Usually they found an extraordinarily large or savage wolf, sometimes it was an outstanding member of their own species, or when they were suffering from grave lack, they used fruit or other food. The chosen, or the elect, occupied the central cavern while his or her closest associate occupied a small ante room. If the elect was human, last wishes were granted, time was allowed for farewells, etcetera.
Lodo had been given the best of care at the oasis to ensure that he would at least last long enough for the burial to take place. The top of the monolith was hastily completed, with just a space at the base of the north wall left open. Once the funeral ceremony was over, the open space would be closed. The building itself was their religious or spiritual testament while the living sacrifice showed the sincerity of their intent. As for me, I could have wished they weren't so earnest.
It seemed I wasn't so regal or pure that they couldn't lay hands on me at the last minute. No doubt they knew by experience that few sacrificial victims voluntarily approached the block, walked the plank, or however the Jovians viewed it. There wasn't a good singing voice in the entire community while their musical instruments were so primitive as to make the howls of wolves sound melodious. Then too, Lodo's presence failed to lighten my mood. He had been beaten too often and too severely, his health was poor to begin with, and the witch doctors who had preserved him for this day hadn't been concerned with his long-term survival.
"We could have been friends," I told him bitterly. "You didn't have to go along with the traditions of your fathers. They've killed you, you know. I mean the traditions."
He lay strapped to a pallet that was upended and propped against a wall in the ante room. His eyes followed me as they took me past him, but I didn't know whether he recognized me or not.
Being so important, I rated a throne rather than a pallet, but my bindings were as common as Lodo's. Several torches lit the chamber so that I could watch as the peasants filled a trough with food and a bowl with water. They did a little dance around my chair, said many words of mumbo jumbo, after which they went away, taking the light of day with them. The torches flickered in the same manner that my heart pitched and bolted.
I could hear them sealing the opening, singing in low tones, not hurrying now that the essentials were taken care of, gentle and soft as if they were tired and happy.
"Emeroo!" I said harshly. "I didn't know right away, but I do now. It began when I realized what they were going to do. When people take one look at me and make up their minds to kill me, those people have got to be human!"
The torches flickered, cold seeped toward me from the thick brick walls, but no voice spoke in my head.
"I tell you, I know!" I said. "I never went to Jupiter at all. This is Earth. You interfered again. Somehow you changed the ship's direction and brought me into another warm family relationship!"
There was no response, no sound in the chamber other than that of my thudding heart. What if I was wrong and this really was Jupiter? Had I been too clever for Emeroo?
"Lodo!" I cried, and heard him groan. There was nothing for me to do but sit in the chair and watch the scurrying shadows.
"I never understood any of it, Emeroo," I said. "I don't think I ever will. Do you hear me? If you can't, if this is Jupiter and you're millions of miles away, then I'll pretend I'm saying good-bye to you face to face."
I never should have argued with her or resisted her. I knew that now. She was all powerful, all good, and she had loved me.
Sometime within the next several hours, Lodo suffocated. I could hear him gasping for breath and then all I heard was silence. As for myself, I didn't make a sound, didn't gasp or cry or beg someone to come and help me. Maybe, when it was too late, I was growing up.
The air became scarce and my brain began to spin. The torches had long since gone out and there was just myself and the darkness. After a while there was only darkness. I dreamed of a filmy gas creeping into the chamber from somewhere. It drifted lazily and ethereally along the floor until it reached my chair after which it climbed and hovered close to me. I could easily have described it as a fond gas. I thought it was green, and then the dream was extinguished.
My sleep lasted only a few moments and when I awakened I looked for the fond, green gas. That wasn't there, so I looked for the chamber and the dead torches. They weren't there, either. In fact the entire monolith was gone, likewise the desert and the village. It looked as if I were in another world.
The mountain trail was steep and by the time I reached the bottom I was out of breath. For the first time in my entire life, I was speechless. Everywhere I looked I saw grass, trees and blue sky. Also, I had been wrong about the weather, for that first chill which I had experienced was temporary and now I reveled in the warmth pouring down on me.
Hesitating, I was caught between a desire to stay there and try and figure out what had happened and a desire to run through the trees ahead of me. I dashed into the woods and ran at top speed for several minutes.
Suddenly the woods were behind me and I found myself on the greenest patch of grass I had ever seen. Hastily I knelt and began to dig. I wanted to see what the bottomlands were like. There weren't any.
Dumbfounded, I finally accepted the fact that all I'd ever find was dirt and then endless clay. I chose another place and reinforced my conclusion that the world was completely and utterly altered. There was nothing on its crust but sod, plants, mountains and, hopefully, people.
My eyes were misty when I found the ocean a few minutes later. It was a great beautiful body that rolled and swelled and made people wet. They were nearly all young and mostly my own age, but the most attractive thing about them was their size. Hardly anyone was smaller than I and many of the boys were taller.
They all wore swimming clothes and I spread my hands over my nakedness only to discover that I wasn't naked at all. Neither was I wearing peasant clothing. I wore a trim little swim suit.
I spent a few minutes sniffling over my past few million years of unhappiness and then I stepped onto the beach, older and wiser and grateful. Wonder of wonders, no one fell down to worship me! Nobody screamed, ran, stared, gawked, pointed a finger, nobody looked at me because I wasn't any different from them. I was just like they were.
No one paid any attention to me except for a boy with golden hair and skin to match. In a way, we didn't speak the same language, but in another way we did.
As it turned out, my biggest, and indeed my only, problem was in finding a place to live. It didn't remain a problem long.
The blond boy tells me I have beautiful eyes. They're a vivid green, flecked with blue.