Alan Foster: Exceptions to Reality

“Safety?” Bowman made a face. “What’s this about ‘safety’? Safety from what?”

The elder turned solemn eyes to the even bigger human. “From migration, of course. Is time of year. When migration over, Akoe come back to river.”

The two men exchanged a glance. “What migration?” LeCleur asked their pensive visitor. “What is migrating?” Uncertain, he scanned the vast, barely undulating plain that extended in all directions beyond the outpost’s perimeter.

“The muffins. Is time of year. Soon now, they migrate.”

A modest herd of less than a hundred thousand of the small brown browsers was clustered in the grass in front of the outpost, grazing peacefully. Their familiar soft peep-peeping filled the morning air. LeCleur watched as several, each no bigger than his closed fist, hopped as close as they dared to the edge of the steep-sided ravine that surrounded the station to graze on the ninicumb flowers that were growing there.

“We’ll see you when you come back, then.”

“No, no!” Old Malakotee was uncharacteristically insistent. “I come warn you.” He gestured emphatically. “You come with Akoe. You big skypeople good folk. Come with us. We keep you safe during migration.”

Bowman smiled condescendingly to the native, whose appearance never failed to put him in mind of an anorexic Munchkin. “That’s very kind of you and your people, Malakotee, but Gerard and I are quite comfortable here. We have protections you can’t see and wouldn’t understand even if I tried to explain them to you.”

The miniature tripartite snout in the center of the Akoe’s face twitched uneasily. “Malakotee know you skypeople got many wondrous things. You show Malakotee plenty. But you no understand. This is ixtex,” he explained, using the native word for the bipedal muffins, “migration!”

“So you’ve told us. I promise you, we’ll be all right. Would you like some tea?” The chemical brew that was Terran tea had been shown to produce interesting, wholly pleasurable reactions within the Akoe body.

Ordinarily Old Malakotee, like any Akoe, would have jumped at the offer. But not this morning. Stepping down from the porch, he gestured purposefully with his staff. Beads jangled and bounced against the rose-hued, dark-streaked wood.

“I tell you. You come with Akoe, we take care of you. You stay here”—he made the Akoe gesture for despair—“no good.” Reaching the ground, he promptly launched into a slow-spinning, head-bending, tail-flicking tribal chant-dance. When he was through, he saluted one final time with his ornamented staff before turning his back on them and striding deliberately away from the outpost.

As LeCleur called forth the heads-up and rotated the bridge shut behind the retreating native, Bowman pondered what they had just seen. “Interesting performance. Wonder if it had any special significance?”

LeCleur, who was more of a xenologist than his partner, banished the command panel display with a word and nodded. “That was the ‘Dance for the Dead.’ He was giving us a polite send-off.”

“Oh.” Bowman squinted at the sky. Just another lovely day on Hedris, as always. “I’ll get the skimmer ready for the census.”

The Akoe had been gone for just over a week when LeCleur was bitten. Bowman looked up from his work as his partner entered. The bite was not deep, but the thin bright line of blood running down the other man’s leg was clearly visible. It emerged from beneath the hem of his field shorts to stain his calf. Plopping himself down in a chair, LeCleur put the first-aid kit on the table and flicked it open. As he applied antiseptic spray and then coagulator, Bowman looked on with casual interest.

“Run into something?”

A disgruntled, slightly embarrassed LeCleur finished treating the wound with a dose of color-coded epider-mase. “Like hell. A damn muffin bit me.”

His partner grunted. “Like I said: run into something?”

“I did not run into it. I was hunting for burrowing arthropods in the grass over in the east quad when I felt something sharp. I looked back, and there was this little furry shitball gnawing on my leg. I had to swat it off. It bounced once, scrambled back to its feet, and shot off into the grass.” He closed the first-aid kit. “Freakish.”

“An accident, yeah.” Bowman couldn’t keep himself from grinning. “It must have mistaken your leg for the mother of all casquak seeds.”

“It wasn’t the incident that was freaky.” LeCleur was not smiling. “It was the muffin. It had sharp teeth.”

Bowman’s grin faded. “That’s impossible. We’ve examined, not to mention eaten, hundreds of muffins since we’ve been here. Not one of them had sharp teeth. Their chewing mechanism is strictly basal molaric dentition, evolved to grind up and process vegetation.”

His partner shook his head slowly. “I saw the teeth, Jamie. Sharp and pointed. Saw them and felt them. And there was something funny about its eyes, too.”

“That’s a description that’ll look nice and formal in the records. ‘Funny’ how?”

Clearly upset, LeCleur pursed his lips. “I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look. They just struck me as funny.” He tapped his leg above the now hermetized bite. “This didn’t.”

“Well, we know they’re not poisonous.” Bowman turned back to his work. “So it was a freak muffin. A break in the muffin routine. An eclectic muffin. I’m sure it was an isolated incident and won’t happen again.”

“It sure won’t.” LeCleur rose and extended his mended leg. “Because next time, you’re doing the periphery arthropod survey.”

It was a week later when Bowman, holding his coffee, walked out onto the porch, sat down in one of the chairs, and had the mug halfway to his lips when something he saw made him pause. Lowering the container, he stared for a long moment before activating the com button attached to the collar of his shirt.

“Gerard, I think you’d better come here. I’m on the porch.”

A dozy mumble responded. The other agent was sleeping in. Bowman continued to nag his partner until he finally appeared, rubbing at his eyes and grumbling. His vision and mind cleared quickly enough as soon as he was able to share his partner’s view.

On the far edge of the ravine, muffins were gathering. Not in the familiar, tidily spaced herd cluster in which they spent the night seeking protection from roving carnivores, nor in the irregular pattern they employed for browsing, but in dense knots of wall-to-wall brown fur. More muffins were arriving every minute, crowding together, filling in the gaps. And from the hundreds, going on thousands, there rose an unexpectedly steady, repetitive peep-peeping that was somehow intimidating in its idiosyncratic sonority.

“What the hell is going on?” LeCleur finally murmured.

Bowman remembered to take a drink of his coffee before pulling the scope from its pocket on the side of the chair. What he saw through the lens was anything but reassuring. He passed it to his partner. “Take a look for yourself.”

LeCleur raised the instrument. The view it displayed resolved into groups of two to three muffins, bunched so tightly together it seemed impossible they could breathe, much less peep. Each showed signs of swelling, their compact bodies having puffed up an additional 10 percent, the brown fur bristling. Their eyes—LeCleur had seen harbingers of that wild, collective red glare in the countenance of the one that had bit him a week ago. When they opened their mouths to peep, the change that had taken place within was immediately apparent. Instead of a succession of smooth, white eruptions of bone, the diminutive jaws were now filled with a mixture of grinding projections and triangular, assertively sharp-edged canines. It was as if the creatures had visited en masse some crazed muffin cosmetic dentist.