When the dirt and leaves and branches and dismembered insects had begun to settle, they rose cautiously. Macha peeped uncertainly out from beneath the ragged shell of a mistreated pandanus leaf.
“Maybe,” observed Ashwood shakily, “the Contisuyuns are even more resourceful than we thought.”
“If they can react this fast,” Igor added fatalistically, “there’s not much point in our trying to run.”
A short walk brought them to the edge of a gully. Below, water from a newly diverted stream ran around the lower edge of a large, fluffy white cloud. It lay amidst shattered trees and other vegetation, looking exactly like something plucked bodily from the sky above and dumped intact into the jungle. It was not what they expected to see.
As they stared, the outlines of the cloud grew hazy. Carter blinked, but it was the cloud and not his eyes that were playing tricks on him. Slowly it transformed itself, until they found themselves gazing down at a verdant hummock covered with a dense growth of small trees, ferns, and other succulents.
A single palm poked its head out of the hummock and swiveled to inspect its surroundings.
Minutes passed during which nothing happened. Then an opening appeared in the side of the hummock, revealing a dark interior. Something not unlike a large blotchy beige carrot standing on its thick end emerged. Instead of arms, thin root-like tendrils extended from the mid to upper portion of the creature’s corpus. Locomotion was provided by a dense pad of six-inch-long cilia beneath the base. Scattered seemingly at random around the upper third of the conical frame were a number of flat glassy discs varying from quarter to silver dollar size. If they were eyes they had no pupils. Several lumpy green straps crisscrossed the wrinkled body like rayon bandoleers.
As the incredible apparition scuttled to the edge of the opening a second creature appeared behind it. It was identical to the first save for being slightly larger and possessed of a few more roots, or tentacles, or whatever the squid-like appendages were. This second nightmare nudged up against its predecessor, promptly knocking it over the edge to land with a discordant splat in the mud below.
Carter could not be certain, but instinct led him to suspect that this did not constitute the creatures’ normal mode of disembarkation.
A third materialized and bumped up against the second, which overbalanced for a moment but did not follow its unfortunate companion into the muck. It turned, or rather pivoted, to confront the one behind.
Carter squinted in discomfort and grabbed at his ears. It felt as if a tropical bumblebee had chosen that moment to commence construction of a hive inside his head. The sensation was more disconcerting than painful. A glance revealed that his companions were suffering equally.
“I do not know what they are,” Igor commented through clenched teeth, “but they are not Contisuyuns.”
“Well, I’ve seen something like them before,” Ashwood said.
Carter turned to her in surprise. “You have? Where?”
“Just last year, at a particularly good restaurant in Colorado, in the house salad.”
“That’s right,” he snapped. “Get set to ingratiate yourself with them.” He returned his attention to the fantastic scene below. “Actually they kind of remind me of some of the petroglyphs at Pusharo and Paititi. What are they, and where did they come from?”
“That must be some kind of camouflaged ship,” Igor decided. “Since they do not travel by transmitter, it may be that they are not friends of the Contisuyuns.”
“You hope,” muttered Ashwood tersely.
The rugose cone which had landed in the mud picked itself up and began using its root-tentacles to flick muck from its flanks. It was about six feet tall, Carter estimated, though without knowing what it was made of he had no way of guessing its weight.
The creature standing in the opening suddenly pointed two tentacles in their direction. Both its companion and the one on the ground pivoted to gaze up the slope.
The irritating buzzing in Carter’s head gave way to a crackling, popping noise as the bee in his brain abruptly switched from hive building to grub frying. Just as he was about to start pounding his skull against the nearest tree to try and mute the internal cacophony, the crackling faded and he heard quite clearly.
“Hullo there, chaps.”
Carter blinked, lowered his hands. Peering into the gully he waved hesitantly by way of reply. “Hello yourselves, whoever you are.”
“Whatever you are,” Ashwood murmured under her breath.
“All that matters to me is that they’re not Contisuyuns.” Igor held on to the branch of a nearby tree as he leaned over into the gully for a better look. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” the creature standing in the aperture replied. How he knew it was the one in the opening doing the talking Carter didn’t know. It had no visible mouth. But he was certain nonetheless. “You don’t look much like Contisuyuns, what?”
“We’re not Contisuyuns,” Igor informed it. “We’re locals, natives of this world. But you know about the Contisuyuns?”
“We know a bit of them, yes. They don’t know much about us. Now I’m afraid that may have to change. Pity, that. They refer to us as ‘Those-Who-Came-Before.’”
Carter swallowed hard. “You mean, you’re the people who built the transmitters and the learning machines?”
“All these centuries to develop and they’re still slow-witted.” The creature standing farther back in the opening gestured with several of its tentacles. “Of course we are,” it replied.
“Quite so, quite.” The one on the ground was still brushing at itself.
A hidden ramp silently extended itself from the lip of the portal to the ground, allowing the second pair of creatures to join their brethren below. It was an uncertain but fascinated trio of humans who descended to greet them. Macha remained on the rim of the gully, observing the encounter with detached feline interest.
“I’m sorry,” Ashwood announced upon concluding a preliminary up-close inspection of the visitors, “but you don’t look like no superrace to me.”
“Did we say we were super anything?” replied the most diminutive of the aliens, whom she immediately dubbed Shorty. Its companions she labeled Crease, for a particularly deep groove along its “front,” and Tree, for being the tallest. They proffered no objections to the unrequested appellations, nor did they counter with names of their own.
Displaying unexpected flexibility, Shorty twisted slightly to regard its companions. “She thinks we’re representatives of a superrace.” Mental laughter tickled Carter’s brain.
“What twaddle. We are no such thing.” Crease seemed to be the most serious member of the trio. “We are simply very intelligent.”
“Then why’d you go away and leave all that stuff on Contisuyu?” Ashwood asked it.
Root-tentacles rippled. “Groups of us like to establish ourselves on new worlds and then move on. We are easily bored, you see. Also, we harbor an intense dislike of packing. It’s most enjoyable to begin anew with each new settlement, build new infrastructures and all that as we go along. Keeps us fresh, don’t you know?”
“Not that we don’t like to revisit old haunts every hundred years or so,” Tree added. “When some of us went back to check on Contisuyu we found that the old homestead had been appropriated by humans. Obviously some of them had stumbled over the old links we’d left behind here and made use of them. They seemed to be having such a sprightly time of it that we decided to step back and leave them alone, to see what they’d make of it.
“After a while we de-energized the link with this world so that they could develop on their own. Then a few months ago the agency on Booj, our homeworld, which keeps an eye on all registered transmitters, reported that several in this vicinity had unexpectedly been reactivated. So it was decided to send a team out this way to check on things.”
