Damon Knight: Orbit 21

Dea gaped. “But how do they do it? What do the Ymon do?”

“We do not know. As far as our investigators have been able to find out, the Ymon—walk through time. You will find out how they accomplish it and tell us.”

For the first time Kathin’s eyes shifted to focus on Dea. After a moment Dea nodded. “Yes.”

The two groups of Ymon rapidly became one, more adults emerging from huts and jungle while children danced in excitement. Dea hung back until Bina came to get her.

“This is Dea, the funny-shaped-ash-skin,” Bina announced. “She’s come with us to the forest.”

There was a rush of comments, both interested and critical. “What for?” “Are you sure it’s alive? Does it talk? Maybe we should eat it.” “No, it must be a person, it wears clothes, doesn’t it?” “But it smells. “ “How can it walk through the forest on feet shaped like that?”

“She can walk through the forest,” Bina insisted. “She walked here. Didn’t make much more noise than a wounded droxil.“

Half of those assembled thought that hilariously funny, retiring from the discussion to clutch their sides and yelp with laughter. Doubters persisted, nonetheless.

“It doesn’t look like a person. I think it’s an animal.”

“I’m a person,” Dea said a little too loudly. “May I stay with you in your village?”

A wizened creature with bright, suspicious eyes inspected Dea thoroughly, tail making lazy waves. “What for?”

“I want to—I want to learn to walk in the forest the way you do. I want to earn a Ymon necklace.”

“But how can you walk, with feet like that?”

“Ho, Kie, you should ask. You have to fall on top of a branz to kill it.”

“I speared it! It’s not my fault—”

“You can sleep in the end hut with Esst. There’ll be a woman festival there soon, sometime. Ambik is fostering her sister’s daughter,” Bina explained, leading her toward the end of the clearing.

“I don’t wish to be a trouble,” Dea said stiffly.

Bina’s tail flicked. “Nine in the hut, ten in the hut—it’ll be warm.”

That was one way to put it, Dea thought. She looked involuntarily up. There were nothing but branches, vines, lianas, leaves, for what seemed like miles. She couldn’t see the sky at all. She wouldn’t see open sky for the next—

“But how can she walk with feet like that!” Kie shouted.

“She’ll learn!” Bina shouted back. Dea stood stock-still for a moment before ducking into the low hut. She would have to learn.

Dea wiped her mouth, shivering. She felt light-headed, more than a little sick. Ambik, one of the few Ymon she could recognize by now, set the pot down with a bang.

“If you won’t eat, then don’t!”

“It has bugs in it! It’s dirty and it has maggots in it—”

“Erl larvae are good food. It’ll work its own way down your throat.” Dea covered her face with her hands. Ambik’s tail whipped angrily,

“Starve, then.” It—she?—stalked away.

Dea hugged her knees and wept quietly. She was so hungry. She wanted to go home, she wanted to go home—

Not looking at it, Dea put her finger in the pot of erl honey and, still crying, licked it off.

Moving along the trail, panting, Dea stopped to swab at her forehead. Bina turned impatiently. “Why are you stopping? We have to get vines for the nets.”

“It’s so hot,” she pleaded. “I can’t breathe.” The air weighed heavily on her. The screeches and sudden screams of birds were slowly becoming familiar—if there were only some sunlight! It was always gloomy, hot, moist and unbearable. She recognized a flower growing on a nearby vine, absently plucked and started to eat it.

“You wear too many clothes,” Bina told her. “They make you dirty. You smell all the time.”

“I do not!”

He snorted, loping off down the trail. “Get a loincloth!” floated back.

Angry and hot, she pounded after him. Thorns tore at her shirtsleeves, ripped at her trousers. “Oh—” She pulled off her jacket and, enraged, kicked it into the thorns. Let the jungle scratch and sting and cut her to branz bait! She didn’t care anymore.

“You smell too!” she yelled after Bina. He started to laugh.

Clad in shorts and breastband, Dea waited comfortably beside the buttress roots. The hunters should be almost finished setting up the nets by now, ready for them to drive animals into it. She sniffed, raising her head to catch the trace of musk. Droxil scent? As she stepped forward, a stick cracked like a gunshot under her boot. There was a scurrying rush and an immediate, angry hubbub,

“It was an accident,” Dea said weakly as Ymon appeared and converged on her.

“They did it.” Esst pointed an accusing tail-tip downward. “Those stupid hard-feet of hers.” There was another rush. Bina landed on her chest, a half second before Dea landed on the ground. Esst and Ambik tugged at her boots.

“I need them!” Dea said, kicking. “I can’t walk without them, they protect my feet!”

“You’ll have to do without them now,” Bina informed her sweetly, breathing hard, pointing upward with his chin. Kie had scrambled twenty meters up a tree with the offending boots and, as she watched, dropped them into a hole in the trunk. There was no opening at the bottom of the tree. The boots were gone. “Stupid human. Do you think we eat air? If we starve, you starve. That was a forty-person droxil , and it got away because of your stupid human hard-feet.”

“I’m not a droxil with hoofs or a branz with paws,” Dea insisted in a small voice. “I need boots to walk.”

“She has little wiggling things at the end of her skin-feet,” Esst announced, fascinated. “Do you think we should cut them off?” Dea jerked her feet underneath her.

“The boots are gone,” Bina said. “Learn to walk again, human. Learn to walk right this time.”

“Ho, Dea,” Ambik greeted her as Dea climbed down the slanting tree trunk. Dea placed her feet carefully, but without fear, and she made little more noise than a Ymon. “Get more fungi when you’re done with that. There’s going to be a woman festival for Esst and Tendati. We’re storing up.”

“When is the festival?” Dea asked, sitting back. The earth was cushiony with fallen leaves and debris, like a mottled living carpet; she wriggled her toes in it casually. A sapling had fallen here last week during the storm; the forest had already absorbed it, in the ceaseless process of decay and regeneration.

“The festival?” Ambik repeated vaguely. “Soon, soon, any day now.”

Dea swallowed. “Esst, Tendati—and me?”

The Ymon watched the forest, tail-tip waving in gentle circles. “Maybe, maybe . . .” She moved off, pausing only to shout over her shoulder, “And bring plenty of vine beer with you!”

On Dea’s eighteenth birthday her father had thrown a huge coming-of-age party. That evening he told her that as a present and a sign of trust he was sending her on a luxurious triplanet tour, to inspect family holdings on the other planets and in the Belt. Dea hugged him, laughed, cried, did not believe it. It was her first time off planet, and her father trusted her to represent him.

The mining base was the third she had visited. It was much like all the others—until the shock-wave hit, a glassy wave, breaking upon human works and crushing them. Domes cracked into webwork; men ran shrieking toward death. Dea saw an invisible line of black racing toward her feet, like a whip cracking. She screamed, and that was the last she remembered.