Hal Clement: Cycle of Fire

He wasted no time in regrets, but stopped where he was and looked around carefully. A few yards away a slab of hardened lava had been broken from the crust and tilted up almost perpendicularly by the pressure of liquid rock underneath. Its upper edge was a good ten feet above the surface in the immediate neighborhood. This was more than twice Dar Lang Ahn’s height, but the sheet was rough enough to give a grip to his claws and he saw no reason to expect difficulty in setting up his buckles at the top.

He unslung the pack of books and lowered it to the hot rock. He made sure it was closed tightly and fastened it in position with one of the pack straps; it would probably rain even here when summer was over, and he could not afford to have the books spoiled or washed away.

Then he removed his harness and checked its individual straps with one eye, while he examined with the other the ridge where he planned to set the buckles. Two or three pieces of leather which seemed superfluous he laid beside the pack; the rest, with the buckles, he strapped once more about his body in order to leave both hands free for climbing.

The upper edge of the slab was as jagged as it had appeared from below and he had little difficulty in snagging the straps around the projections. He arranged one buckle so that its reflected beams pointed southward, rising at a small angle; the other he tried to set for the eyes of a searcher directly overhead. Neither, of course, was very likely to attract attention — they really depended only upon Arren’s light, since the red sun would only be above the horizon for a short time before and after summer and the air lanes would be empty during the hot season itself. Still, it was the best that Dar Lang Ahn could do, and with the bits of metal arranged to his satisfaction he took one more look around before descending.

The landscape was shimmering more than ever. Once again he felt almost sure that he had seen something disappear behind a slab of rock, in the direction from which he had come. He dismissed the illusion from his mind and began to climb down, paying close attention to his hand and foot holds; he had no wish to spend his remaining few hours with the agony of a broken bone, even if there was no way to make the time really comfortable.

He reached the bottom safely and, after a few moments’ thought, dragged his book pack into the shadow of the ridge. Then he settled himself calmly, using the pack as a pillow, folded his arms across his chest, closed his eyes, and relaxed. There was nothing more to do; perhaps his centuries-trained sense of duty was not exactly satisfied, but even it could not find a specific task to make him perform.

It would be nearly impossible to put his thoughts into words. No doubt he regretted dying earlier than his fellows. Quite possibly he considered the bleak landscape spread before him and wondered idly just how much farther he would have had to get in order to live. However, Dar Lang Ahn was not human, and the pictures which formed most of his thoughts, being shaped by an eyesight and cultural background drastically different from those of any human being, could never be properly translated to the mind of a person of Earth. Even Nils Kruger, as adaptable a young man as might be found anywhere and who certainly became as well acquainted with Dar Lang Ahn as anyone could, refuses to guess at what went on in his mind between the time he settled down to die and the time Kruger caught up with him.

The boy’s approach went unheard by Dar, keen though his ears normally were. He was not entirely unconscious, however, for the scent of water affected him enough not only to snap his eyes open but to send him bounding to his feet. For just an instant his eyes roved wildly about in all directions, then they both fastened on the figure toiling over the rock a dozen yards away.

Dar Lang Ahn had never before had reason to distrust either his memory or his sanity, but this time he felt that something must be wrong with one or the other. This living thing was shaped correctly, more or less, but the size was unbelievable. It towered a good foot above his own four feet and a half, and that was simply wrong. The other oddities were minor — eyes in the front of its face, a beaklike projection above the mouth, pinkish coloration instead of purplish-black — but the height put it out of any class which Dar could drag from his memory. People, other than accident victims who had had to start over, were four and a half feet tall, just now; Teachers were a little under eight. There was nothing between those limits that walked on two legs.

Then even the size was driven from his thoughts by another fact. The smell of water that had roused him was coming from this creature; it must be literally drenched with the stuff. Dar Lang Ahn started to move toward the newcomer as this realization struck him, but he stopped after the first step. He was too weak. He groped backward, seeking support from the slab of rock in whose shadow he had been lying. With its aid he held up while the unbelievable thing approached; then, with the scent of water burning his nostrils, everything seemed to let go at once. A curtain dropped in front of his eyes and the rough stone at his back ceased to hurt. He felt his knees give, but not his impact with the lava.

IT WAS the taste of water that roused him, as its scent had a few minutes before. For long moments he let the liquid trickle into his mouth without opening his eyes or noticing anything peculiar in its taste. He could feel the strength flow back into his body along with the precious fluid and he simply enjoyed the sensation without even trying to think.

That, of course, could not last after his eyes were open, and finally he did open them. What he saw was sufficient to bring his mind to full alertness almost instantly.

It was not that the human face so close to his was weird in appearance; that appearance had already been engraved on his memory before he collapsed and it caused him no surprise now. It took only a few seconds of consciousness to allow him to realize that this creature was not a person as he understood the term, but that it evidently was not unfriendly and not entirely lacking in good sense. It was providing the water which was reviving him, after all. The tension Dar Lang Ahn felt at this point was due not to surprise at Kruger’s presence or appearance, therefore, but to astonishment at the source of water. The strange thing was actually squeezing into his open mouth one of the pulpy plants. This act gave rise to the first of the misunderstandings which were to complicate the friendship of the two for a long time to come.

Dar Lang Ahn concluded instantly that Kruger must be a native of the volcano region, since he had such surprising knowledge of its plant life. This, naturally, caused him to regard the boy with more than a little uneasiness. Kruger, on his part, had been following the native from the time of the glider crash, had seen him ignore consistently the plants which so closely resembled Earth’s cacti, and had only with the greatest difficulty been able to persuade himself that the little being’s obvious distress was caused by thirst.

Had their positions been reversed Kruger would, of course, have felt properly grateful to anyone or anything which had supplied him with water, whether it was human or a walking pineapple, but he knew perfectly well that “proper gratitude” was not a universal trait even with his own kind. Therefore the moment that Dar Lang Ahn’s eyes opened the boy laid the partly squeezed cactus down within the native’s reach and stepped backward. Personal caution was only part of his reason; he wanted to relieve any possible fear that the creature might feel.

Dar Lang Ahn handled immediate problems first. With one eye held on his strange helper — he did not know for a long time the uneasy sensation that very act could arouse in a human being — he used the other and one hand to find, pick up, and return to his mouth the plant whose juices had revived him. He kept it there for a long time, convinced that he would be able to use the last drop of fluid he could squeeze from it, but before it was quite empty another thought struck him. It made him pause.