Dark Eden

beside the water. There were twenty thirty of them, as big as widebucks and with a buck’s mouth-feelers and big flat eyes, but they had no legs at all, only two little arms at the front with webbed hands on them like a duck, and four long fishy fins. They were
slow
slow when they were moving about on the rocks, just like a woollybuck or widebuck would be if it lost its legs and was trying to wriggle around without them. But in the water, among the wavy trees that swayed down there with their watery lanterns shining yellow and green, those great fat things swooped and dived as quickly and gracefully as bats hunting flutterbyes among the lantern trees in Circle Clearing.
    Dix shot one of the creatures with an arrow. What a screaming and a yelling it made!
Eeeeeeee! Eeeeeee! Eeeeeee!
And then all of the other ones started up as well.
Eeeeeeee! Eeeeeee! Eeeeeee!
they screeched as they wriggled to the edge of the rocks, tipped themselves into the water and then shot off down into the depths like they’d suddenly become arrows themselves, shot from a powerful bow, heading down and down and down.
    Dix and me and John and Gerry put down the kids we were carrying and scrambled down the rocks to finish off the squirming thing with clubs and spears. We skinned it and cut it into pieces. We didn’t cook it on a fire, because we didn’t want to make smoke, but we cut the meat in strips and scorched it on a spiketree. It was rich fatty meat. It filled you up quickly and lay heavy in your stomach for a long time, and it made a couple of people get sick. But, Gela’s eyes, that was good thick fat, and, like John said, if you needed fat for snow-wraps or to seal up a boat, those creatures would be the place to go to get it. So we called them fatbucks.

    Next waking, John went out in front as usual, this time with Jeff and Gerry and Harry, excited and keen to find more new things. Pretty soon they were so far ahead of the rest of us that we could hardly see them at all. The brightness of Worldpool made the cliffs along its edge look dark by comparison and we could just barely make out the four of them – John, Jeff, Gerry and my big dumb brother – as little dark specks on top of that dark mass of rock, with the shining water on one side of them, and the shining forest on the other. Far off ahead of them – so far off you couldn’t tell if it was in forest or out in Worldpool or in Dark or what – a volcano was burning. You could see its dark red flame where Eden’s shadow met sky, and then, above that, the stain of black smoke trailing across Starry Swirl.
    The rest of us plodded along steadily behind for some time, until suddenly we realized that the ones in front were yelling and hollering. We couldn’t tell what they were saying, or whether they were excited or scared – the warm wind coming off the water was blowing in our ears and buffeting our faces – but John and Harry and Gerry were waving and jumping up and down on the cliff like they were crazy. Only Jeff was still calm, sitting up on the back of his buck and watching the others shout and yell.
    Gela’s tits, what
was
it? What could they have found?
    We began to run forward.
    As we drew nearer we saw they were standing in front of some big solid thing lying in the trees some ten fifteen yards back from top of the rocks. At first it looked like a boulder of some kind, a
big
big boulder, almost a hill. And then – Tom’s neck – as we got closer we began to see why their cries had sounded so strange. They didn’t
know
if they were excited or scared. They didn’t
know
if this was good good or bad bad, because it was something we’d never seen before. We’d never seen anything that was even a bit like it.
    You had to stand and stare at it a long long time before you could even get your eyes to tell you what sort of shape you were looking at. Even the stuff it was made of was something new, not wood or rock or earth or anything like that at all. It was smooth and shiny, like . . . like
metal
. But it was hard to believe so
much
metal could be all together in one place, because this thing wasn’t the size of the little metal ring on John’s finger, it was the size of Circle of Stones itself!
    It was that shape too. It was a huge
huge
circle of metal, tipped a little bit on its side with the lowest part of it sticking into dirt of the forest floor, all mashed and broken up. It was like this huge thing had somehow
fallen
there, or been thrown down hard