Saucerers and Gondoliers - Chapter 9

Chapter 9 - Aboriginal Megafauna

When they got back to Airlock Thirteen, Cleo's beautiful clean floor was a mess. Not just one, but four pairs of feet seemed to have trailed dirt all over it. Two of the sets of footprints were small and bare, and were walking in from outside the colony. "That's us", said Ant. One set of prints was smaller still, wearing shoes with NIKE printed on the soles, and was going out, apparently pushing something that had wheels. "That's Cleo", said Ant.
The third set of prints had three toes and claws, and was going in.
"Erm", said Glenn Bob. "Maybe we should have shut that there door after ourselves after all."
"Cleo", said Ant in concern.
"No", said Glenn Bob, pointing to the tracks. "Her print is on top of the big one, see? It means she came out after it went in."
Ant stared at the huge clawprint. "Is that a Megafauna?"
Glenn Bob nodded with an air of knowledge. "Small one, of course", he added.
"More of a minifauna, then."
Glenn Bob seemed to come to a decision. He crossed the corridor, opened a panel in the wall, and pressed a button marked CAUTION USE ONLY IN EMERGENCY GOSH DANG IT. Alarms - far louder and more powerful alarms - began sounding.
Glenn Bob spoke into the wall. "This here is Glenn Bob Linklater speaking, y'hear. We have us a megafaunal intrusion situation at Airlock Thirteen. Small one about man size, no casualties as yet, fauna is headed in the direction of hydroponics."
Glenn Bob took his finger off the button. The alarms continued to sound. Ant stared at Glenn Bob open-mouthed.
"You've just told them we're alive, and where we are."
Glenn Bob stared at the wall defiantly. "Iffen that thing gets into the colony without warning, it will kill folks. My folks." As they walked back out into the sunlight, he swung the airlock door shut. "Help me dog this hatch." As Ant set to turning the wheel, Glenn Bob added: "Iffen we get caught now, pa'll stake me out in the swamps in pinchfly matin’ season with ma bewtocks smeared with molasses sure as dang an that's swearin."
As the door didn't need to be shut airtight, only megafauna-tight, they only needed to turn the wheel twice around; then they ran out, shivering in the cold air and water, and still being very careful where they put their feet.
"Well, you two couldn't make any more noise without a brass section and a PA system."
Cleo was standing on the deck of a rubber dinghy the size of a bouncy castle, floating in the middle of a rock pool which, Ant was relieved to note, was not beautifully blue. She was wearing rubber cleaning gloves, and had a Jackson's Deadly Carmine Sea Puff in the palm of one hand. "These little furry pink things are so cutesome. I keep wanting to just kiss them." She noticed Ant and Glenn Bob's expressions of alarm. "What? Is that bad?"
"How did you get back there without us?" said Ant.
"I came down the laundry lift", said Cleo, as if only fools didn't.
Mr. Turpin was lying in the dinghy, surrounded by a host of Carmine Sea Puffs. Glenn Bob scrambled gingerly onto the boat and knocked the things away from him with the back of his glove. Ant climbed aboard and inspected Mr. Turpin. He was still breathing.
Ant looked up at Cleo. Her own Carmine Sea Puff was attempting to climb up her arm past the end of her glove.
"Lose the fluffy pencil case, Cleo."
Cleo lost the Sea Puff. It splashed down into the water. When it tried to climb back out up onto the dinghy hull, Glenn Bob smacked it down again with the flat of his shovel.
"Did you bring the boots and socks?" said Ant urgently. Cleo nodded in the direction of a stack of crates in the opposite end of the dinghy, and Ant and Glenn Bob fell on them like starving vegetarians on a luckless radish.
"Ah, sweet, beautiful socks", sighed Glenn Bob.
"Which direction is Out Of Here?" said Ant.
Cleo shrugged. "I spent the last ten minutes inflating the boat." She brushed a Carmine Sea Puff off her shoe irritably.
Ant stared round the rock pool.
"Cleo", he said, "you've inflated it in a pool only a bit larger than it is."
Cleo followed Ant's eyes.
"Well", she said angrily, "you might concentrate on all the things I've done right, rather than niggling about one piffling little detail."
"Why did you think we needed a dinghy in the first place? You saw the land we came in over. There must have been at least a hundred miles of it."
"It might come in useful", said Cleo defensively.
"Very useful", nodded Glenn Bob vigorously in agreement.
"You hear that?" said Cleo. "Bobby Glenn thinks it's useful."
"I'm Glenn Bob", said Glenn Bob. "My brother's Bobby Glenn."
Ant leapt off the boat, narrowly avoiding capsizing it. Cleo and Glenn Bob swayed dangerously.
"Well", said Ant, "I'm going to make myself useful. We are going to have to get through this wire." He scrambled up to the nearest concrete pillar, which was overgrown with undevegetated weed, and launched a flying kick at it. The pillar swayed, but bounced back and nearly knocked Ant into the rock pool. All around Ant, the wires sang like harpstrings, but still sizzled with what sounded like a great deal of electricity.
"Ant", said Cleo severely, "what precisely are you trying to do?"
"This support pillar is the rottenest one in this section of wire, I reckon", said Ant. "Ever wonder why they wind these cables up so tight they scream in the breeze?"
"Nope", said Glenn Bob. "Iffen you miss that pillar base when you kick it, you gonna get yourself electrificated", he added helpfully.
Ant charged the base of the pillar again. This time, the pillar gave more than he'd been expecting, and he nearly sprawled forward onto the electrified wires. There were tiny PTANG-PTANG-PTANGs coming from the cables.
"Ant", said Cleo, "please stop doing that."
"They wind them up tight", Ant said, gulping for breath, "because most of the fence pillars are so badly eaten away that -" he charged the wire again - "they need the wires on either side to hold them up."
He collided with the fencepost. There was a terrific CRACK, a multiple TWANG, and a FZZZ-HSSSSS-PAZING. The fence collapsed around him like an electric octopus as all of its cables severed at once. Ant dived into the dirt, hugging the concrete pillar as it tumbled onto the rocks. Cleo and Glenn Bob ducked as the wires flailed overhead trailing sparks.
After a moment's pause, Ant sat back on his heels.
"Well", he said, "that's the fence down now."
"That was one of the most bizarre acts of stupidity I have ever seen", said Cleo.
Ant grinned. "There's a sort of rivulet over there. Shall we lift the boat and see if it fits into it?"
It took several minutes to heave the inflatable out of the water and over the dead cables without puncturing it on all the rock, concrete and steel. The boat slid gently into the small channel of water, which trickled down from a waterfall at the edge of the Croatoan mesa. Glancing upstream, Ant saw that steel bars had been fixed across the channel under the perimeter fence to stop anything from squirming into the colony by stealth.
"Let's go", he said.
Cleo handed out the oars, and Ant and Glenn Bob used them as best they could.
***
It became easier to paddle after a while; the oars stopped catching on the rocks, and the channel became wider, its banks seen only dimly in a closing mist. However, Ant felt that they were now paddling against a current.
"Against the current?", he said to nobody in particular, looking upstream to where the waterfall was still cascading down towards them, clearly visible above the low-lying fog.
His wrist communicator buzzed angrily. Automatically, he put it to his ear.
"KIN YEW HERE ME THERE BOY?" said the communicator.
Ant stared at the communicator without speaking. Glenn Bob and Cleo stopped pushing and paddling. The voice was shouting loudly enough for them to hear it too.
"WE KNOW YOU DONE STOLE TWO RADIO TRANSCEIVERS. WE REQUIRE THEIR RETURN. YOUR IRRESPONSIBLE ACTIONS HAVE RESULTED IN THE DEATHS OF TWO CROATOAN CITIZENS."
Glenn Bob went whiter than a bleached sheet.
"They're lying", whispered Ant. "There's not been time for anyone to die."
"There's been time", said Glenn Bob, shaking his head. "Old man Goldspink got hisself gutted top to toe by a Megafauna in one go, and they only ever found the half of him."
"IN VIEW OF YOUR TENDER AGES, WE ARE PREPARED TO COMMUTE CHARGES OF MURDER IFFEN YOU RETURN IMMEDIATELY AND SURRENDER ALL THE PROPERTY YOU DONE STOLE THERE, YOU GOT YOUR EARS ON?"
"They'd never say so if we'd really killed anyone", said Cleo in a voice that suggested she was not entirely sure.
"CERTAINLY", the communicator gloated, "THEM TRANSCEIVERS YOU DONE STOLEN ARE NOT CAPABLE OF COMMUNICATING WITH NO COMMUNIST VESSEL IN ORBIT. YOU WILL STARVE OUT THERE IN THE BARRENS BEFORE YOUR SOCIALIST ASSOCIATES ARRIVE TO PICK YOU UP. OVER."
"Ha!" said Ant. "Little do they know of our other transceiver in the ruins of Roanoke."
"Oh, they do", said Glenn Bob. "Whole dang town knows about that."
Cleo's jaw dropped. "Then that'll be the first place they'll LOOK!"
Glenn Bob appeared to consider this as if he hadn't before. "I reckon so", he conceded.
"NOW HEAR THIS, GODLESS COMMUNISTS", the wrist communicator buzzed. "WE WILL SHORTLY BE CONDUCTING A THOROUGH SEARCH OF THE BARRENS AROUND OUR GREAT COLONY OF CROATOAN USING TRACKER GASTROPODS, AND WE WILL FIND YOU."
The rivulet seemed to be emptying out into a lake. Ant's paddle would not touch the bottom. He couldn’t see through the mist to the banks any longer.
"Tracker gastropods?" said Ant.
Glenn Bob nodded. "Better'n dogs. A tracker sluggie can smell down a man over soil, sand, mud, even underwater. Iffen the feller climbs a wall to stop his scent going on the ground, the sluggie'll follow him plumb up the wall and across the ceiling. An if it gits him", said Glenn Bob with gruesome relish, "it eats out his eyes, an while he's still usin 'em too."
"You made up that last bit, didn't you", said Cleo.
"So what if I did", said Glenn Bob defensively. "The tracking part of it's true as Euclid's Fifth. My dad had him an old sluggie that sniffed out a thief two years after he'd done did the thievin, left the planet, travelled to sixteen different worlds and then come back again. And", Glenn Bob continued, as if this was even more amazing, "the feller'd had him at least one bath in that time too, with soap and all."
Cleo thought about this a second, then said: "So, basically your father was unable to catch the original criminal, so he picked on the first likely stranger to step off a ship and framed him."
Glenn Bob's eyes widened. "Aw no", he said. "My pa wouldn't do that."
Ant stared down at the rivulet, which now seemed to have widened so much on either side that its banks could not be reached with his paddle.
"Hey", he said. "We're supposed to be fighting the current. How did we get so far downstream?"
Glenn Bob stared at him blankly.
"And furthermore", continued Ant, "why does downstream seem to be uphill?" He turned round to point upstream, in the direction of the waterfall, and gaped as a cool breeze wafted across the landscape like a giant hand, wiping the fog away.
Upstream, the world had changed. The waterfall was still clearly visible, but was now tumbling off the edge, not of a mesa in the middle of a jumble of rocks and weeds, but of an island in the middle of a huge body of water that stretched from horizon to horizon.
"Where did the world go?" said Ant weakly.
"Tide's a-comin in", explained Glenn Bob.
"But we're a hundred miles inland", objected Ant.
"That's why it comes in so quick", said Glenn Bob. "We're as close to the coast as a Yankee is to a monkey."
"The tide comes a hundred miles inland?"
"Well, yeah", said Glenn Bob, in the same tone of voice Ant might have used to say, 'Well, yes, the horizon is usually found between the earth and the sky.' And then Ant remembered the dirty brown edges each continent on New Dixie had had when seen from space; bands hundreds of miles wide, like the soggy edges of a piece of tissue dropped on a wet floor.
"Three moons", he said. "You have three moons. And moons make tides."
"Can you smell that?" said Cleo.
Ant sniffed the air. If this was possible, there was actually something worse in it than the stench of rotting weed. Ant knew the smell from school science experiments. Mr. Postlethwaite had told them 'not to take in too much of a whiff from the test tube, or it'll sting like heck on legs'.
"Ammonia", he said.
Glenn Bob's face dropped.
"Aw, no", he said softly, staring into the sea underneath the dinghy's hull.
"What is it now?" said Cleo. "It's something bad again, isn't it."
"A Coldkraken", said Glenn Bob. "Mostly they live right down there on the sea bottoms, but sometimes young ones get fooled up into shallow water by cold water rising. They get big...real big..." He was now only whispering, staring down into the water in terror.
"How big?" said Cleo. "Or do I not really want to know?"
Ant pointed a trembling finger down into the water. Cleo followed the finger. In the depths under the dinghy, something big and round and silvery floated motionless.
"That's big enough", said Cleo.
"It's as big as the boat", said Ant.
"That", said Glenn Bob, "is its eye."
Ant sank back into the boat, very slowly. Glenn Bob continued to move his finger in the direction of Croatoan, to where the water seemed to change colour over the edge of a large sandbank. Then he drew the finger round in a circle till it pointed at the scarlet moon, which was setting. The sandbank extended all around them.
"That's not a sandbank, is it?" said Cleo.
Glenn Bob shook his head.
"We're plumb right above it. If we're quiet, it might let us alone and just think we're a lump of flotsam. But coldkrakens usually live down in the deeps with their mouths open ready to eat what they can git. They'll eat just about any durn thing or body."
"Is there anything they won't eat?"
Glenn Bob thought a moment. "Um - rocks...avocado...certain types of steel..."
He appeared suddenly to have a brainstorm, picked up Cleo's paddle, and threw it overboard.
"GLENN BOB!" shouted Ant angrily.
"It's ornje", said Glenn Bob.
"What's an ornje?" said Cleo. "Don't tell me, it's probably something big and dangerous, probably venomous as well. I'm better off not knowing."
Glenn Bob looked confused. "An ornje", he said, "is a fruit. An also a colour", he added helpfully. “Coldkrakens eat stuff that’s ornje. They go out of their way to git to it.” He looked across at Ant and Cleo’s uniforms. “Uh...”
Ant looked down the front of his Croatoan uniform slowly. Like everything else in the landscape, it looked red.
He looked up at Glenn Bob helplessly.
"I give up", he said. "Is it ornje too?"
"It's ornje so as folk can find us iffen we get lost in the blizzards", nodded Glenn Bob.
"BLIZZARDS???" said Cleo.
"Ssssh", said Ant, pointing into the sea. "Remember who's downstairs."
Cleo looked down at her own uniform.
"Omigod", she said. "It's orange, it's orange, it's orange -“
"We know", said Ant and Glenn Bob together.
"Oh well", sighed Ant, looking at his new-found warm socks sadly, "I suppose there's nothing for it."
***
Ant, Glenn Bob and Cleo huddled together on the deck in a single huge American flag.
"I suppose we can only be thankful our pants weren't ornje as well", said Ant.
"Why would anyone put an American flag in a survival kit?" said Cleo.
"Iffen you spread it out, it makes you more visible from the air", said Glenn Bob. "An we had us a few thousand extra flags after we landed, pa said. Goverment wanted Roanoke Colony to have a population of five thousand by 1980, an every homestead was goin to have an American flag on its drive."
"On its drive", repeated Cleo. "Glenn Bob, you live in holes in the ground."
"I know", said Glenn Bob mournfully. "Tell it to the megafauna."
"Shove over", said Ant. "I've only got the stars bit. You pair are hogging all the stripes."
Glenn Bob stared into the water. "Kraken's gone."
Croatoan Island was now only a black smudge on the horizon - the only black smudge in a sea of gently washing surf.
"Tide's come in real gentle today", said Glenn Bob. "Sometimes we gets breakers up to clifftop height."
Ant and Cleo stared at Glenn Bob venomously.
"I feel seasick", said Glenn Bob.
"Try swallowing ten times while holding your breath", said Ant.
"That's for hiccups", said Glenn Bob, "not seasickness."
"Try holding your breath and counting to a million, then", said Cleo nastily.
"I just wish the rocks on the horizon wouldn't keep moving", said Glenn Bob. Gamely, he began counting. "One - two - ah, three, there - ah, four -"
"ROCKS ON THE HORIZON", breathed Ant, as if this was somehow of great importance. Cleo stared at him oddly.
" - ah, five, six seven - eight, nine, ten -"
"You can't count out loud", snapped Cleo at Glenn Bob. "Every time you say something you breathe out!"
Ant shot to his feet. Cleo screamed. "ANT! YOU'LL CAPSIZE THE BOAT!"
Ant looked down at Cleo. The boat had not moved a millimetre. Cleo looked carefully at the horizon, then peered over the edge of the dinghy.
"Careful peering over the edge of the dinghy there", said Glenn Bob.
"Dry land!" shouted Cleo. "We're on dry land!"
There was, indeed, land under the dinghy - and it was getting drier. The jumble of rocks the boat had come to rest on was getting larger by the minute.
"Tide's going out", said Glenn Bob.
"Already?" said Ant.
"Moons move fast", said Glenn Bob. "We're goin to have to carry this here inflatable. I still feel seasick", he added.
"Carry it? Why can't we leave it and walk?" said Cleo.
Glenn Bob spat with unerring accuracy at a passing Sea Puff. "Out here, a man always carries his inflatable. Tide might in again in another few minutes. Maybe I'm landsick", he added.
Ant's wrist communicator hissed into life. "NOW HEAR THIS, WE ARE ON YOUR TRAIL THERE COME BACK."
Ant did not Come Back, but instead struggled with Cleo and Glenn Bob to get the dinghy up onto their shoulders without dislodging Mr. Turpin, who was moaning softly.
"Why can't he wake up and pull his weight?" muttered Cleo. "Which is a great deal, incidentally."
"Where are we?" said Ant, looking up at the horizon, which now had considerably more than its previous share of small rocky islands.
"Cajuns Column, at a guess", said Glenn Bob. "Cajuns' is the first spot in a mile to come up after a high tide. Excepting Croatoan, that is. And it's made of plutonic basalt, like these here rocks underfoot."
"You navigate by geology", said Ant.
"Got to. Landscape becomes seascape every half hour."
Mr. Turpin was just as heavy as Cleo had said. However, progress down from the top of Cajuns Column would have been slow in any case, as the tide was only retreating at a slow walk.
"Couldn't we just put the dinghy down in the water and float downhill?" said Cleo.
"Not a chance", said Glenn Bob. "When the tide turns, you get out of the water quickeren stink, iffen you don't want to get yerself sucked in to the Roanoke Maelstrom."
"Maelstrom", said Ant.
"That'll go with the krakens and the blizzards and the Deadly Carmine Sea Puffs, then", said Cleo.
Glenn Bob nodded. "Only a mile off the shoreline. The maelstrom forms every high tide, travels back out to sea and breaks up again. It's a whirlpool a hundred miles wide. Cleans the seabed like a big old Electrolux."
Ant remembered the big spiral hurricanes he'd seen in the seas around the edges of New Dixie's continents from space. Suddenly, he realized they hadn't been hurricanes.
The communicator buzzed again.
"WE HAVE PICKED UP YOUR VILE COMMUNIST SPOOR", it said. "OUR TRACKING GASTROPODS ARE CLOSE BEHIND YOU THERE, COME BACK."
Ant, Glenn Bob and Cleo looked around themselves in confusion. For miles in all directions, empty gurgling surf stretched out to the horizon.
"They's tellin lies", observed Glenn Bob darkly. "Don't you come back now, y'all."
"WE CAN SEE YOU HIDIN THERE BEHIND THAT ROCK NOW", insisted the communicator. "GIVE YOURSELVES UP NOW THERE."
"Well, they obviously think they can see us", said Cleo.
A fainter noise could now be heard in the background on the communicator, yelling: "Hold your fire there y'all! I ain't done nothin!"
Glenn Bob yelped in delight. "That there's my twin brother, Bobby Glenn! Could be he smells just a little bit too like me."
The communicator rasped in triumph: "NOW COME ON OUT THERE, VARMINT. HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD, DAGNABIT." A hideous sucking sound filled the speaker for a moment, and the same voice barked: "DOWN THERE, SLUGGIE."
"We've got a head start", whispered Ant. "They'll take a while to realize they've got the wrong varmint."
"They'll pick up the trail again", promised Glenn Bob darkly. "A sluggie always gits his man."
"Then we'd better press on to Roanoke", said Ant. "Lift up your side there!"
Grunting and struggling, they heaved the dinghy onto their shoulders, and trudged downwards through a tumble of weed-grown boulders.
***
The sun Ant had once thought of as weak beat down pitilessly. All around, the drying weed was crackling with a sound like a steamroller driving over eggs. Ant was uncomfortably aware that, in nothing but boots and underpants, he was in danger of getting sunburn, and also looked amazingly stupid. Glenn Bob, in regulation Croatoan long underwear, would probably do better in the sunburn stakes, but certainly had picked the short straw in the stupidity ones. Cleo, meanwhile, appeared immune to the sun, and somehow managed to not look stupid at all. Ant reminded himself that this was because girls intrinsically looked better in underwear than boys.
"At least -" Ant puffed -" at least they can't hear us moving, with the weed making so much racket."
"They'll smell us out", moaned Glenn Bob. "There's sluggies on our tails right now, depend on it."
The dinghy, with Mr. Turpin in it, was impossibly heavy, and the weed underfoot hopelessly slippery. It was a wonder Mr. Turpin had not yet slipped off into a Nibbler and been Nibbled.
"We should be seeing this Roanoke place soon", gasped Cleo, "it's above sea level constantly, just like Croatoan, after all."
Glenn Bob frowned. "Not as such."
"WHAT?" Ant dropped his corner of dinghy, and narrowly missed dropping Mr. Turpin with it. "You mean Roanoke is UNDERWATER?"
"Not all of the time. Only at major conjunctions of the moons."
"So would you mind telling me how a radio transceiver can survive god knows how many years' immersion in salt water?"
"It might", said Glenn Bob defensively.
Ant let go of the dinghy altogether, forcing Glenn Bob and Cleo to put down their parts of it as well. Grumpily, he sat down next to Mr. Turpin's head. Mr. Turpin was drooling.
The wrist communicator buzzed again.
"WON'T TAKE US LONG TO PICK UP A FRESH TRAIL", it boasted. "WE ARE ALSO ABOUT TO COMMANDEER US AN AERIAL SEARCH OF THIS HERE ENVIRONMENTAL VICINITY, AND YOU AIN'T GOIN NOWHERE. MR. GLENN BOB LINKLATER, YOUR POOR DEAR MOTHER URGES YOU TO COME BACK, COME BACK."
"Let's face it", said Ant, "we're sunk. There's no way we can avoid being spotted from the air."
"BY COORDINATIN OUR EFFORTS BY AIR SEA AN LAND, WE SHALL BUILD AN EVER SHRINKIN BAG OF STEEL AROUND YOUR NECKS JUST LIKE RATS IN A MANACLE", said the communicator, and added: "OUR TENTACLES ARE EVERYWHERE. Say, what's that overhead, Billy Hank?"
"Don't know rightly. Looks like a big ole Cuban cigar. What’s it look like on radar?"
“...uh...like God’s clean air, Billy Hank.”
"Only a Commie would build a ship that looks like a big ole Cuban cigar. HEY, YOU! GET OUT OF OUR SKY! THAT'S UNITED STATES OF AMERICA SKY!"
"BILLY HANK! DID YOU SEE THAT? IT DONE ZAPPED BILLY HANK -"
"IT'S HEADED FOR THE SETTLEMENT -"
"REGROUP, AND FOLLOW ME, SOLDIERS!"
"HEY, WHO ELECTED YOU LEADER THERE Y'ALL HSSSSSSSSSSSS -"
But Cleo didn't answer. She was busy staring at the horizon with wide eyes.
"The tide's coming in", she said.
"The tide's come in before", said Ant.
"No", she said. "I mean the tide's really coming in."
Ant stood up and squinted into the sun.
"I see nothing", he said, "but a load of clouds on the horizon."
"Those aren't clouds", said Cleo. "They're wave tops."