21

As he tried to bring the rifle around to bear on his attacker, Cheelo’s finger contracted reflexively on the trigger. A tiny, very intense, and highly localized sonic boom echoed through the building. Hapec gazed down in disbelief at the small but lethal hole that the sonic burst had punched through him from stomach to spine. Even as he clasped both hands over the perforation, blood began to gush forth between his fingers. Mouth gaping in a silent “O” of surprise, he staggered toward the two combatants before sinking to his knees and then toppling languidly forward, like a brown iceberg calving from the face of a glacier, to the floor of the garage.

Maruco managed to grab the muzzle of the rifle before Cheelo could bring it around for a second shot. They struggled violently and in complete silence for possession of the weapon—until a second boom rattled the diminutive oneway windows that lined the walls of the enclosure.

Thorax pumping, Desvendapur pressed back against the airtruck and contemplated the bloody panorama spread out before him. Two humans lay dead on the floor, their body fluids leaking from their ruptured circulatory systems. Only one remained standing, the weapon dangling loosely from a hand. Heart pounding, chest heaving, Cheelo stood staring down at the body of Maruco lying at his feet like a broken doll.

Desvendapur had of course read of such violence, and he knew of it from the evidence of his own family history. Here was the sort of confrontation that harked back to the time when the AAnn had attacked Paszex and wiped out most of his ancestors. But despite holding the weapon earlier himself he had not really expected to have to use it. This was the first time he had ever witnessed such savagery in person. “This—this is barbaric! A terrible thing!” Wonderful new phrases were already evolving unbidden in his brain, refusing to be ignored.

Cheelo took a deep breath. “It sure is. Now we’ll never learn the activation code for the truck. We’re stuck.”

The poet’s eyes rose to fix the surviving biped in their multilenticular stare. “I don’t mean that. I mean that two sapient beings are dead.”

Cheelo pushed out his lower lip. “Nothing terrible about that. Not as far as I’m concerned.” His voice rose in protest. “Hey, you think I wanted to shoot them?” Desvendapur took a wary step in the direction of the accessway. “Take it easy. The conversation got kind of tense, I got a little confused, and they tried to jump me.” When the alien did not respond, Cheelo became upset. “Look, I’m telling you the truth. They thought I was going to shoot them after they activated the truck. I wasn’t going to. Sure, I wanted to, but I was going to leave them alive. All I wanted was out of here so I could get to my meeting. And before you go getting all bent out of joint, remember that they’d figured it out, about your being from a colony and all. If they’d been left here they still could’ve sold that information. Look at it like this: I had to shoot them to protect your people down in the Reserva.”

“They might have tried to persuade others to go looking for the hive, but without specific coordinates they would never have found it. Never.” Desvendapur continued to eye the biped accusingly, or at least in a manner that the defensive Cheelo continued to interpret as accusing.

“It doesn’t matter,” Cheelo finally declared curtly. “They’re dead and we’re not. Believe me, it’s no loss to the species.”

“The death of any sapient is a loss.”

His human companion uttered several sharply intoned words whose meaning the thranx did not recognize. “I don’t know about species wide, but there are sure some variations in our individual values.” With the muzzle of the rifle he roughly nudged the corpse at his feet. Maruco the poacher did not move and would not poach again.

Walking over to the tool rack, Cheelo snapped the rifle into an empty charging cradle and turned to ponder the silent airtruck. “I can try to start this big bastard up, but unless these guys were completely confident in their isolation here, or were total idiots, there are probably about two million possible key codes.” His gaze rose to the nearest of the one-way windows. “You saw the country around here on the way in. This place is really isolated. There’s nothing nearby but some automated farming projects. We can try for one.”

“I do not think so.” Desvendapur argued.

“Why not?” His respiration slowly returning to normal, Cheelo stared at the thranx.

“While you were fighting with our captors I was hearing voices from their communicator. Someone with an especially authoritative voice was demanding to know where the one called Maruco had gone. When no response was forthcoming, the transmission was terminated with the words ‘See you soon you little shit.’ While I do not interpret that to mean that the speaker’s appearance is imminent, it struck me as a promise to arrive in a finite period of time.”

“You’re right. Dammit!” Cheelo thought furiously. “I forgot about their bug buyers. We’d better not be around when they show up.” A look of distaste on his face, he calmly contemplated the human debris staining the floor. “Help me with these two.” Moving off, he searched for the manual door opener he knew had to exist.

“What are we going to do? Carry out some kind of formal burial ritual?” Despite his dismay at the carnage that had occurred, it would not prevent the poet from recording the details of what promised to be a particularly fascinating human rite.

“More like an informal one.” Locating a control panel, Cheelo brushed touchplates, activating lights, servos, and an automatic washer before finding the one that operated the garage door. Cold, intensely dry air swept in from outside as the barrier rattled upward.

Working together, they hauled the bodies of the two poachers one at a time to the rim of the nearest obliging precipice and shoved them over the edge, watching as each limp lump of dead meat rolled and bumped its way into cloud-swathed oblivion. Desvendapur was disappointed by the lack of ceremony, having anticipated a certain amount of exotic alien chanting or dancing. But the biped who had become his companion mouthed only a few words, and none of them struck the poet as especially complimentary to or respectful of the deceased.

That onerous duty done, they returned to the deserted outpost where Desvendapur did his best to assist the human in cleansing the garage floor of blood. When he was satisfied, Cheelo stepped back to survey their work, wiping sweat from his forehead. Though the exudation of clear fluid by the biped’s body as a means of maintaining its internal temperature was a process Desvendapur had already observed in the forest, he never ceased to be captivated by it.

“There!” Cheelo sighed tiredly. “When their buyers arrive, they won’t know where their favorite ninlocos have hopped off to. They’ll see that the airtruck is still here—we can’t do anything about that—but that won’t automatically lead them to assume that something’s happened to them. They’ll start a search, but one that’s considered and unhurried. By the time they find the bodies, if they find the bodies, and figure out that maybe they ought to be looking for somebody like us—or like me, anyway—we’ll both be safe and out of sight back down in the Reserva. I know if I follow the river it’ll take me into Sintuya, where I can book a flight back to Lima. I still have enough time to make it to Golfito.” Walking back to the wall, he yanked the sonic rifle free from the charging bracket.

“Expensive little toy, this.” He rotated the sophisticated weapon in his hands. “So our trip up here wasn’t a total loss. Let’s help ourselves to the pantry and get out of here before nanny shows up.”

“I cannot.”

Cheelo blinked at the alien. “What d’you mean, ‘you cannot’? You sure as hell can’t stay here.” He indicated a window that revealed the barren plateau outside. “Whoever comes looking for those two ninlocos won’t hesitate about shoving you in a cage.” Nobody’d make any money off it, either, he reflected.

“I will explain matters to them. That I wish to study them.” Antennae bobbed. “Perhaps a mutual accommodation can be reached.”

“You can take your goddamn studying for inspiration and…!” Cheelo calmed himself, remembering that the visibly flinching thranx was sensitive to the volume of the booming human voice. “You don’t understand, Des. These people who are coming, they’re gonna be nervous and on edge because they’re unable to contact their two guys here. They’ll come in fast and quiet, and if the first thing they see is a giant, big-eyed bug wandering around loose instead of properly caged up, they might not stop to smell the roses—or the alien that smells like one. They’re liable to blast you into half a dozen pieces before you get the chance to ‘explain matters’ to them.”

“They might not shoot first,” Desvendapur argued.

“No, that’s right. They might not.” He pushed past the thranx, striding toward the corridor that led to the outpost’s living quarters. “I’m going to start packing. You want to stay here and put your life in the hands of a bunch of senior ninlocos who aren’t exactly experienced in the formalities of unanticipated interspecies contact, you go right ahead. Me, I’d rather put my trust in the monkeys. I’m heading down into the forest.”

Left behind in the garage to meditate on his limited options, Desvendapur soon turned to follow the biped into the other part of the station.

“You don’t understand, Cheelo Montoya. It is not that I want to remain here. The fact is that I have little choice in the matter.”

Cheelo did not look up from where he was stuffing handfuls of concentrates from the outpost’s food locker into his backpack. “Ay? Why’s that?”

“Did you not notice that I was barely able to help you remove and dispose of the two cadavers? It was not because their weight was excessive. It was because the air here is far too dry for my kind. More importantly, the temperature is borderline freezing.”

Pausing in his scavenging, Cheelo turned to regard the alien. “Okay, I can see where that could be a problem. But from here it’s all downhill into the Reserva. The lower we go, the hotter and more humid it’ll become and the better you’ll feel.”

The heart-shaped head slowly nodded acquiescence while truhands and antennae bobbed understandingly. “I know that is so. The difficult, and critical, question is: Will it become hot and humid enough soon enough?”

“I can’t answer that,” the human responded evenly. “I don’t know what your tolerances are.”

“I cannot answer it myself. But I fear to try it. By the wings that no longer fly, I do.”

From hidden, long-unvisited depths Cheelo dragged up what little compassion remained in him. “Maybe we can rig you some kind of cold-weather gear. I’m no tailor, and I don’t see an autogarb in this dump, but I suppose we could cut up some blankets or something. Your only alternatives are to wait here and hope you can talk faster than the people who are coming can shoot, or to strike out across this plateau and try and find another place far enough away that they won’t search it.”

The thranx indicated negativity. “If I am to walk, better to aim for a more accommodating climate than one I already know to be hostile.” Turning, he gestured at the terrain beyond a window. “I would not make it across the first valley before my joints began to stiffen from the cold. And remember: I have one bad leg.”

“And five good ones. Well, you think about it.” Cheelo returned to his foraging. “Whatever you decide to do, I’ll help you if I can—provided it doesn’t cost me any more time.”

In the end, Desvendapur decided that despite his increasing mastery of the human’s language, he was neither confident nor fluent enough to risk an encounter with the dead poachers’ customers. Already he had experience of the volatile nature of human response and its reaction to unforeseen events. Not knowing what to expect within the outpost that now failed to respond to their queries, whoever was coming in search of the absent poachers might well unload a rush of lethality in his direction before he could explain himself.

Whatever the chastisement meted out to him upon his return to the colony, it would not include summary execution. The question was, could he make it all the way down to the salubrious surroundings of the lowland rain forest? It seemed he had no choice but to try. Certainly the biped thought so. Having made the decision, the poet fell to scrounging supplies of his own from the outpost’s stores, relying on the human to elucidate the contents of the bewildering variety of multihued food packages and containers.

When their respective packs were bulging with supplies, human and thranx turned their attention to the question of how to insulate someone whose anatomy did not remotely resemble that of an upright mammal. Utilizing the clothing of the deceased proved impossible: None of it would fit over Desvendapur’s head or around his body. They settled for wrapping his thorax and abdomen as best they could in several of the high-altitude, lightweight blankets that covered two of the station’s beds. Unfortunately, these relied for their generous heating properties on picking up waved energy from a broadcast coil located in the floor of the single bedroom. Outside the buildings and beyond the coil’s limited range, the caloric elements woven into the blankets would go inert.

“That’s the best I can do,” an impatient Cheelo assured his chitinous companion. “There’s nothing else here that’d work any better. It’s all tech stuff. Stands to reason they’d bring in the most basic of everything they’d need. In a town we could probably find some old-style, heavier wrappings.” He nodded curtly toward the nearest window. “No telling how far it is to the nearest village. I know I didn’t see one on the way here.”

“Nor did I,” conceded Desvendapur. Wrapped in the blankets that the human had clumsily cinched around him with cord, the thranx knew he must present a highly incongruous sight. Contemplating himself in a reflective surface, he removed his scri!ber from the thorax pouch that was now hidden beneath the artificial covering and began to recite.

Cheelo looked on in disgust as he tightened a strap on his own pack. “Don’t you ever take a break from that composing?”

Winding up a stanza that oozed systemic emotion, the thranx paused the instrument. “For someone like myself, to stop composing would be to start to die.”

The human grunted, one of its more primitive sounds, and activated the doorplate. The composite barrier began to roll upward. Cold, searingly dry air rushed hungrily into the insulated structure, overwhelming any warmth before it. Desvendapur’s mandibles clacked shut to prevent the deadly cold from entering his system via his mouth. At such times it was useful not to have to open one’s jaws to breathe. The biped had cut two long, narrow slits in the blanket that covered the poet’s thorax, allowing his spicules access to the air. Internally, his lungs constricted at the intrusion of the frigid atmosphere. Trying not to shudder, he took a hesitant step forward.

“Let’s go. The sooner we start downward, the sooner the air will start to warm and to thicken with moisture.”

Cheelo said nothing, nodding curtly as he followed him out of the garage.

There was a path, of sorts, made by what animal or animals Cheelo did not know. It was just wide enough for them to proceed along it in single file. Possibly the poachers themselves had enlarged it to allow access to the cloud forest and the rare creatures that dwelled in the little-visited ecosystem lying between plateau and jungle. Llamas would not have made such a track, but far-ranging carnivores like jaguars or the spectacled bear might have tramped back and forth along the same route for enough generations to have worn a path through the unrelenting greenery.

Far more comfortable in the cool mountain air than his companion, Cheelo would have quickly outdistanced him but for the fact that the thranx, utilizing all six legs, was much more sure-footed on the narrow path. Where the thief was forced to take extra care before negotiating an awkward dip or steep drop, Desvendapur simply ambled on, so that the distance between them never became too great.

At midday they paused to eat beside a miniature waterfall. Huge butterflies fluttered on wings of metallic hue, skating the edge of the spray, while mosquitoes danced among the lush ferns that framed the musical cataract. Cheelo was feeling fit and expansive, but it was plain that his many-legged companion was not doing nearly as well.

“C’mon, pick your antennae up,” he urged the thranx. “We’re doing good.” Chewing a strip of reconstituted meat, he nodded at the clouds scudding along mournfully below them. “We’ll be down to where it’s revoltingly hot and sticky before you know it.”

“That is what I am afraid of.” Desvendapur huddled as best he could beneath the thin blankets that hung all too loosely around him. “That it will happen before I know of it.”

“Is pessimism a common thranx characteristic?” Cheelo chided him playfully.

Without much success, the poet tried to tuck his exposed, unprotected limbs more tightly beneath him. “The human ability to adapt to extremes of climate is one we do not share. I find it difficult to believe that you are comfortable in these surroundings.”

“Oh, it’s on the brisk side; make no mistake about that. But now that we’re off the high plateau and down in cloud forest there ought to be enough moisture in the air for you.”

“Truly, the weight of the air is improving,” Desvendapur admitted. “But it’s still cold, so cold!”

“Eat your vegetables,” he advised the thranx. How many times as a child had his mother admonished him to do just that? He smiled to himself at the remembrance. The smile did not last. She had told him things like that when she wasn’t hitting him or bringing home a different visiting “uncle” every week or so. His expression darkened as he rose.

“C’mon, get up. We’ll push it until you start feeling better.” Gratefully, the poet struggled to his six feet, taking care not to shrug off any of the inadequate blankets or put too much pressure on the splinted middle limb.

But he did not start feeling better. Cheelo could not believe how rapidly the thranx’s condition deteriorated. Within a short while after their meal the alien began to experience difficulty in walking.

“I…I am all right,” Desvendapur replied in response to the human’s query. “I just need to rest for a time-part.”

“No.” Cheelo was unbending. “No resting. Not here.” Even as the thranx started to sink down onto its abdomen, Cheelo was reaching out to grab the bug and pull it back to its feet. The smooth, unyielding chitin of an upper arm was shockingly icy to the touch. “Shit, you’re as cold as these rocks!”

Golden-hued compound eyes peered up at him. “My system is concentrating its body heat internally to protect vital organs. I can still walk. I just need to rest first, to gather my strength.”

Cheelo’s reply was grim. “You ‘rest’ for very long and you won’t have to worry about gathering any strength.” Why was he so concerned? What did it matter to him if the bug died? He could kick the body over the side of the narrow trail and into the gorge where the rich friends of the dead ninlocos would never find it. Continuing on alone, he would make better time. Soon he’d find himself down by the river, and then back in the outpost of civilization called Sintuya. Climate-controlled hotel rooms, real food, insect screens, and a quick flight to Lima or Iquitos, then on to Golfito and his appointment with Ehrenhardt. After a rapid electronic transfer of credit, his own franchise. Money, importance, fine clothes, sloe gin, and fast women. Respect, for Cheelo Montoya.

It had been promised to him and was all there for the taking. With all that in prospect, why should he exert himself on behalf of a bug, even an oversized, intelligent one? The thranx had brought him nothing but trouble. Oh sure, maybe it had saved his life up on the ridge, but if he’d never met it, he would never have found himself in that life-threatening situation. As if that wasn’t reason enough, the insectoid was a criminal, an antisocial, among its own kind! It wasn’t like he would be extending himself to help rescue some alien saint or important diplomat.

Des’s limbs folded up against his abdomen and thorax as he sank down and huddled beneath the blankets. Even his upstanding antennae folded up, collapsing into tight curls to minimize heat loss. Cheelo stared. Ahead, the trail beckoned: a slender, rutted, dirt-and-mud track leading to one paved with gold. With luck—and if the trail held—he’d be down by nightfall and in Sintuya the following evening. He felt good, and as he went lower, the increasing amount of oxygen gave an additional boost to his spirits.

He took a couple of steps down the trail, turning to look back over a shoulder. “Come on. We can’t stop here if we want to get out of the mountains by nightfall.”

“A moment, just a moment,” the thranx pleaded. Its voice was even wispier than usual.

Cheelo Montoya waited irritably as he gazed at the impenetrable, eternal clouds crawling up the green-clad slopes. “Ah, hell.” Turning, he walked back to where the alien had slumped to the ground, all blue-green glaze and crumpled legs. Swinging his pack around so that it rested not against his spine and shoulders but across his chest, he turned his back to the poet, crouched, and bent forward.

“Come on. Get up and walk. It’s downhill. Let one leg fall in front of the other.”

“Fall?” The barely perceptible, protective transparent eye membrane trembled. “I do not follow your meaning.”

“Hurry up!” Annoyed, impatient, and angry at himself, Cheelo had no time for stupid questions. “Put your upper limbs over my shoulders, here.” He tapped himself. “Hang on tight. I’ll carry you for a while. It’ll warm up quick as we go down, and soon you’ll be able to walk on your own again. You’ll see.”

“You—you would carry me?”

“Not if you squat there clicking and hissing! Stand up, dammit, before I have any more time to think about how dumb this is and change my mind.”

It was an eerie, chilling sensation, the touch of hard, cold limbs against his shoulders, as if a gigantic crab were scrambling up his back. By utilizing all four front limbs the thranx was able to obtain a secure grip on the human’s upper torso. Glancing down, Cheelo could see the gripping digits locked together across his chest beneath pack and straps. All sixteen of them. The embrace was secure without being constricting. The thranx was solidly built, but not unbearably heavy. He decided he could manage it for a while, especially since it was downhill all the way. The biggest danger would come from stumbling or tripping, not from collapsing beneath the moderate alien weight.

Twisting to look around and down, he saw the other four alien limbs hanging loose, two on either side of his legs and hips. Exquisite alien body scent filled his nostrils. Enveloped by perfume, he resumed the descent.

“Just hang on,” he snapped irritably at his motionless burden. “You’ll feel better as soon as it’s warmer.”

“Yes.” Sensing the four alien mandibles moving against the flesh of his shoulder, Cheelo tried not to shudder. “As soon as it is warmer. I do not know how to thank you.” The exotic alien syllables echoed eerily against his ear.

“Try shutting up for a while,” his human bearer suggested. The poet obediently lapsed into silence.

The more relaxed beneath the extra weight he became, the faster Cheelo found he could move. By afternoon the pace of their descent had increased markedly. True to his word, the thranx maintained a merciful muteness, not even requesting that they stop for a meal. The alien’s silent acquiescence suited Cheelo just fine.

By the time the shrouded sun had commenced its swift plunge behind the Andes in search of the distant Pacific, Cheelo estimated that they had descended almost halfway to the rain forest below. Tomorrow noontime would see them enter the outskirts of the lowlands, where the temperature and the humidity would reach levels uncomfortable to Cheelo but complaisant for the thranx.

“Time to get off,” he told his passenger. Reacting slowly and with deliberation, the thranx released its hold on the human’s torso and dropped to the ground.

“I could not have come this far without your aid.” Clutching tightly at the blankets with both tru- and foothands, the poet singled out a log on which to spend the coming night, painfully straddling it with all four trulegs. The dead wood was damp and chilly against his exposed abdomen.

“Ay, you have to be feeling better.” Without knowing why he bothered, Cheelo tried to cheer his companion. “It’s warmer here, so you ought to be more comfortable.”

“It is warmer,” the thranx admitted. “But not so warm that I am comfortable.”

“Tomorrow,” Cheelo promised him. Kneeling beside his own pack, he searched for one of the smokeless fire sticks he had appropriated from the poacher outpost. The stick was intended to help start a blaze, but in the absence of any dry fuel he would just have to burn one stick after another until they made their own tiny campfire. They were as likely to find dry wood lying on the floor of a cloud forest as orchids sprouting on tundra.

As he prepared his simple meal Cheelo noticed that the thranx was not moving. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

“Not hungry. Too cold.” Antennae uncurled halfway but no further.

Shaking his head, Cheelo rose and walked over to examine the contents of the alien’s pack. “For a space-traversing species you’re not very adaptable.”

“We evolved and still prefer to live underground.” Even the thranx’s usually elegant, graceful gestures were subdued. “It is difficult to adjust to extremes of climate when you do not experience them.”

Cheelo shrugged as he rehydrated an assortment of dried fruit. At least water for food rehydration was not a problem in the cloud forest. With the onset of evening it was already beginning to precipitate out on his skin and clothing. Blankets or not, they would be compelled to endure at least one chill, moist night on the steep mountainside. Hot food and drink would help to minimize its effects.

Despite its obvious disinterest in the food, the thranx ate, albeit slowly and with care. Scarfing down his own meal, Cheelo watched the alien closely.

“Feel better?” he asked when both had finished. As always, it was fascinating to watch the bug clean its mandibles with its truhands. It put Cheelo in mind of a praying mantis gleaning the last bits of prey from its razor-sharp jaws.

“Yes, I do.” A foothand traced a discreet pattern in the air while the two truhands continued their hygiene, causing Cheelo to reflect on the usefulness of possessing two sets of hands. “This gesture I am making is one of more than moderate thanks.”

“Like this?” Cheelo’s arm and hand contorted in an ungainly try at mimicry.

The alien did not laugh at or criticize the clumsy attempt. “You have the upper portion of the movement correct, but the lower should go this way.” He demonstrated. Once again, Cheelo did his best to imitate the comparatively simple gesture.

“Better,” declared Desvendapur. “Try it again.”

“I’m doing the best I can.” Muttering, Cheelo adjusted his arm. “Between shoulder and wrist I’ve only got three joints to your four.”

“Near enough.” The foothand extended and pulled back at a particular angle. “This is the gesture for agreement.”

“So now I’m supposed to learn how to nod with my arm?” Cheelo smiled thinly.

The lesson was an improvement over charades. In this manner they passed the time until total darkness. They had to keep the lesson simple. Not because Cheelo was insufficiently flexible to approximate the thranx’s gestures, but because there was no getting around the fact that the more elaborate ones required the use of two pairs of upper appendages. Despite his desire to learn, the thief could not see himself lying down and writhing all four limbs in the air like a beetle trapped on its back.

Morning arrived on the underside of a cloud, crisp and moist. Yawning, Cheelo turned over in his bedroll. The night had been clammy and cold, but not intolerably so. The temperature had stayed well above that common to the plateau high above.

He stretched as he sat up, letting his blanket tumble from his shoulders to bunch up around his waist. Glancing to his right, he saw that his alien companion was still asleep, huddled beneath its makeshift cold-weather gear, all eight limbs contracted tightly beneath its thorax and abdomen.

“Time to move,” he announced unsympathetically. Rising, he scratched at himself. “Come on. If we get a good start we’ll be all the way down by evening. I’ll rehydrate some broccoli or some other green shit for you.” Among the litany of terrestrial fruits and vegetables it had sampled, the thranx had proven particularly fond of broccoli. As far as Cheelo was concerned, this only reinforced the differences between their respective species.

When no response was forthcoming, either verbally or in the form of the by-now-familiar elegant gestures, Cheelo walked over and nudged the blue-green torso with a foot. “Rise and shine, Des. Not that you don’t shine all the time.”

To look at the thranx was to see nothing wrong. The same brushed, metallic blue-green sheen gleamed from wing cases and limbs, head and neck. The multiple lenses of the eyes, each as big as a human fist, threw back the early morning light in cascades of gold. But something was missing. It took Cheelo a long moment before it struck him.

It was an absence of fragrance.

There was no smell. The delicate, flowery miasma that was the thranx’s signature perfume had vanished entirely. Bending over, he inhaled deeply of nothing but fresh mountain air. Then he saw that along with the enthralling alien scent something else had departed. Leaning forward, he gave an uncertain shove with both hands.

Stiff as if frozen, the thranx fell over onto its side, scavenged blankets fluttering briefly like dark wings. They had become a funereal shroud. Rigid legs and arms remained fixed in the positions in which they had last been held, folded tight and close to the body.

“Des? C’mon, I got no time to coddle bugs. Get up.” Kneeling, he tentatively grasped one upper limb and tugged gently. It did not flex, and there was no reaction. Using both hands, he pulled harder.

A sharp, splintery crack split the air, and the uppermost joint, together with the truhand, came away in his startled fingers. Blood, dark red tinged with green, began to seep from the maimed limb. A shocked Cheelo straightened and threw the amputated length of alien appendage aside. The dismemberment had provoked neither reaction nor response. Stunned, Cheelo realized that Desvendapur was beyond both.

Sitting down hard, indifferent to the damp vegetation and the cold clamminess of the ground, a disbelieving Cheelo could only stare. The bug was dead. No, he corrected himself. No. The poet was dead. Desmelper…Dreshenwn…

Christ, he cursed silently. He still couldn’t pronounce the alien’s name. Now it was possible he never would, because the owner of that appellation could no longer lecture him on the fine points of thranx enunciation. He found himself wishing he’d paid more attention when the alien had talked about himself. He found himself wishing he’d paid more attention to a lot of things.

Well, it was too bad, but it wasn’t his fault. Unpredictable destiny served as every sentient’s copilot. Just because the thranx had met his here on a cold, wet mountainside in the central Andes didn’t mean Cheelo Montoya had any obligation to follow its lead. His fate still lay somewhere in the future, first in Golfito and then in the remunerative flesh pits of Monterrey. His conscience was clear.

As for the bug, he owed it nothing. Hell, it didn’t even belong on his world! The consequences it had suffered were the consummation of its own unforced, willful actions. No guilt concerning the final outcome attached to Cheelo or, for that matter, to anyone else. It was dead; things hadn’t worked out; and Cheelo had seen it all before, albeit only among his own kind. No big deal. No big deal at all.

Then why did he feel so goddamn lousy?

This is ridiculous, he told himself. He’d done his best by the alien, just as it had by him. Neither of them had anything to be sorry for. If called before a court of judgment, both could have honestly proclaimed the verity of their conduct while traveling in each other’s company. Besides, if the situation were reversed, if he, Cheelo Montoya, had been the one lying dead and motionless among the undergrowth, what would the thranx have done? Returned to its own people, for sure, and left him to rot forlorn and forgotten on the surface of the sodden earth.

Of course, Cheelo Montoya had nothing to leave behind.

He wavered. There was no one to coerce him, no accusatory visages staring at him from the depths of the cloud forest. Whatever urgency he felt came entirely from within, though from where within he could not have said. It made no sense, and he was nothing if not a sensible man. Everything he had ever learned, every ounce of self, all that there was that went to make him what was known as “him,” shouted at him to pick up his gear and be on his way. Head down, get going, abandon the no-longer-needed campsite by the little waterfall. Seek out a comfortable room in beckoning Sintuya, arrange his flight, and claim the franchise that had been promised to him. His life had been one long litany of misery and failure. Until now.

Tightening his jaw, he rolled the body, blankets and all, into a dense mass of dark green brush. There it would lie hidden from above until the cloud forest claimed it. Not that the perpetual clouds needed any help in concealing objects on the ground from above.

Snatching up his backpack with a violent grab, he swung it onto his shoulders, checked the seals, and started resolutely down the trail. As he did so, he stumbled over something unyielding. Snapping off a muttered curse, he started to kick aside the piece of broken branch, only to see that the obstacle that had momentarily interrupted the resumption of his determined descent was not made of wood. It was the upper joint and hand he had unexpectedly wrenched from the thranx’s body.

Divorced from the rest of the arm, it had assumed an air of artificiality. Surely those stiff, delicate digits were detached from some calcareous sculpture and not a living being. Sublime in its design, sleek and functional, it was of no use to its former owner anymore, and certainly not to him. Bending to pick it up, he examined it closely for a moment before tossing it indifferently over his shoulder and resuming his descent.

Down among the next line of vegetation he halted. Cloud forest trees bloomed intermittently year-round. Ahead rose one that was like a roaring blaze among green stone, an umbrella of brilliant crimson blossoms. Sunbirds sipped drunkenly at the bounteous nectar while giant electric blue morpho butterflies flitted among the branches like the scoured scales of some fantastic cerulean fish. Cheelo stood gazing at the breathtakingly beautiful sight for a long time. Then, without really knowing why, he turned around and began to retrace his steps.