From the back cover:
While on a routine census sweep of a star system, space-station anthropologist Cassandra Uland crash lands on a planet that has suffered an unknown ecological disaster, rendering it mostly desert. She is befriended by Nex, a native man whom the rest of the population shuns as a cannibal.

After Nex saves Cassandra's life in defiance of the Council, she discovers in his possession a mysterious golden box called the Idecis, revered for its mystical powers. Everyone wants it, but no one, including Nex, knows how to use it.

When Cassandra stumbles onto the key of the Idecis, she finds that it unlocks not only the purpose of this strange box but the origin of the world's disaster and the present evil that lies waiting in a desert cavern. In the midst of the ensuing struggle, a rescue ship arrives for Cassandra. The question that looms for her is: will the cannibal let her go?


CHAPTER ONE

Captain Enders glanced at the monitor just over his head and began speaking for the benefit of the voice-activated ship's log. "Pulsar date four seven two five, oh six hundred hours, the Tryster approaching the last planet in our census sweep of the Pollux system. Planet . . . ?"

He wearily turned for the needed information to the engineer seated beside him. This man grimaced and replied, "Who can keep all these dinky little planets straight? Ask the anthropologist." He emphasized the last word in derision.

Accustomed to such petty slights, a woman in the back seat of the small craft barely looked up. She had an angular face with sea-green eyes and thick black hair which she kept under control in a chignon. "BV eight oh six," she murmured in reply.

"BZ eight oh six," the captain told the log.

"BV," the anthropologist corrected him. "V as in Victor."

"What difference does it make?" he sighed, removing his ball cap and tossing it aside. It was a reproduction of ancient head gear popular among pilots.

"Actually, it has a very interesting population," the anthropologist began, rubbing her eye. In her mid-twenties, she was still young enough to possess a novice's appreciation of her field, but experienced enough to have more than a surface knowledge. Thus it was always difficult for her to understand why her male shipmates usually discounted her opinions. She tried not to let it eat at her, else she'd never make it through these extended missions.

So she brushed a wisp of hair out of her eyes and started to explain, "They are a primitive, agrarian people, but they have a unique system of laws and social structure—"

These lectures of hers, accompanied by such unconscious feminine habits as playing with her hair, drove her shipmates equally to the brink. "I'm so sick of this junket, if I see another 'interesting population,' I may just zap them all," uttered the engineer, finding some relief in complaining. Lean, muscular, and vain, he was a man of action who found these routine sweeps increasingly intolerable. He had already decided that this one was his last, and he was correct.

"You're a tribute to the scientific world, Wilsey," the anthro-pologist observed with heavy irony.

"Spare me the 'righteous scientist' routine, Uland," he returned. "There are others just as competent as you. Someone else had to gather all this data you quote as gospel. Someone else broke down the language and computerized it before you were born. And someone else observed this population's 'impressive' social structure without their ever being aware of it. And all that happened without any of your help or—"

"Oh, shut up, Wilsey," Captain Enders said tiredly, as if he'd said it too often before. The captain was a large man—too large for such a small craft—and he bitterly resented having charge of these sweeps. Every waking moment he went over the disciplinary proceedings that had resulted in this assignment, and all he thought about was the appeal pending his return to base. As he was not interested in talking to his shipmates, he sure wasn't going to listen to their sniping.

Anthropologist Uland retreated to the familiar comfort of her computer screen, summoning a phonetic alphabet of the dominant language of BV/806 along with common words and sentence structure, which she duly memorized. She imagined that it had some resemblance to the Latin she had learned as a schoolgirl on Earth Station 16, her birthplace. (She also felt rather smug at knowing some Latin to be able to make the comparison.) Because she had been living on a space station all her life, it was natural that she should become part of the exploration team. Actually, it seemed that few people chose to remain on the space station for any length of time. They slipped into the black void of space, searching for . . . what? Something more than artificially recycled life.

Ectu, estu, ertu. . . . Uland concentrated on the conjugations flashing across the screen. Although she never had the time she wished for a thorough study of the languages spoken on the worlds they passed, she found that even a cursory knowledge helped her compile and interpret data more accurately. Were this a privately funded trip, that would be more important, but even the government deserved something for its money.

This language seemed to have a rhythmic difference from most she knew—it was almost sung instead of spoken. Uland turned up the volume on the voice synthesizer to be certain she was catching the inflections correctly. After a moment, she realized that verb tenses and conjugations were determined not by suffixes or sentence placement, but by the pitch of the voice.

She laughed inwardly, Wouldn't it be awful if my life were to hang on being able to speak this? I'm practically tone deaf! But the music lured her to linger over it. This was a language that could have been spoken somewhere on Earth in peaceful, long-ago romantic times, if such times had ever existed.

She closed her eyes and slipped toward a forbidden realm she had only experienced in virtual reality—a world of brown earth and green grass, running streams and things that grow out of the ground. She only wished to visit that world, to touch it, not stay. . . . Without warning the longings inside her burst into something more terrifying: an almost overwhelming lust for wood and warmth and tenderness—

In a panic, she shut down the mental images and focused on the computer screen to regain self-control. Losing herself in these dreams would get her locked up in compulsory observation quicker than anything besides "acting out" violently. She had seen it happen to others, and once they were that far gone from reality, they never returned.

After glancing at her shipmates, who ignored her as usual, she returned to the written structure of the language. She quickly began to comprehend simple phrases without interpretation, and she hazily wondered. . . . Suppose all the races of humans she had encountered on these sweeps had a common birthplace and origin? Suppose that at some point in the far distant past, all humankind in the universe had been scattered to their worlds from one point of origin, like stars in an exploding galaxy?

She paused over the computer, arrested by the thought. Wasn't it remarkable that each human population of a planet was distinctly different from all the animal species? Yes, there were many different kinds of human, with widely varying physical characteristics, but surely that was due to their environment. The people of BH/426 had thick, leathery skin because their atmosphere contained high levels of naturally occurring corrosive gases. And the population of CS/800 walked on all fours because of the extreme gravity. Yet both of these populations had writing, art, music, and philosophy. They were unmistakably human.

In contrast, the inhabitants of PP/219 walked on two legs, built shelters, and communicated with each other. But they had no concept of past or future; they could not store collective learning nor pass it on. That elevated consciousness was missing. Even the Catalog of Universal Species labeled them "animal." (Uland was discounting the new, revised edition of CUS that, in accordance with current political mandates, made no distinction between human and animal. The new edition was a staple in everyone's data files, but anyone who actually needed information secretly consulted the old edition.)

This glaring, unspoken distinction appeared everywhere in the known galaxies, even with extremely barbaric populations. There might be conflicting opinions as to whether a certain species was plant or animal, but the dividing line between human and animal was manifest, although indefinable.

As she was musing on this, the Captain said, "Coming up, Cass." She swiveled to see a blip looming large on his navigational screen. "Atmospheric readings?" he asked routinely.

"Oxygen-nitrogen," she confirmed. She read off other data, comparing them to what was logged from previous explorations: "Diameter, twelve thousand kilometers; two moons; eighty-five percent of the surface is water." She paused, digesting more information, then resumed to the Captain, "The planet's populations live entirely in or around five centers—cities, if you will. We'll need to hover directly above each of these to get an accurate count."

"Right," Captain Enders said, extending a mechanical probe as the ship descended into orbit. "Wilsey, what's our altitude?"

The engineer glanced at his instruments. "Nine hundred sixty kilometers," he returned disinterestedly.

"Careful," Cass murmured. "We're on the fringes of the exo-sphere."

"Will you let me do my own job?" he replied wiltingly.

Cass ignored the jibe and the Captain turned on the visual monitors to scan the surface of the planet. Three large screens displayed color images of what lay beneath the craft. Cass murmured, "Look at that!"

The screens were filled with dazzling, vibrating displays of light. Wherever the probes were turned, they picked up this wildly energetic show of color. "Isn't it incredible?" Cass muttered appreciatively.

"They're only auroras," Wilsey said. "Nothing all that special. Only—why are we picking them up from here?"

"They are throughout the thermosphere, not just isolated at the poles," she observed, consulting her instruments. "That indicates a very strong magnetic field around this planet—something I did not know." She turned back to search the data banks.

Without reference to this, Captain Enders said, "Descending to scan planet surface." Cass nodded without taking her eyes from her computer screen. Having found the topographical data on this planet, she was engrossed by meadows of blue-green heather and starkly jagged mountain peaks. Large flowering trees rippled and dipped, releasing a flock of white birds to the air.

The historical data then showed a city which seemed to stretch halfway across the world. Its buildings soared with vaults and domes, and its streets bustled with life. In its midst was a profusely blooming garden.

As Cass watched this visual from a previous expedition, the threat of dreams washed over her again—life! greenness! sun, night and an honest death! Closing her eyes, she steeled herself against the insanity that would compel her to spend the rest of her life in a 3-by-3-meter cubicle, useless but for medical research.

Suddenly the internal pressure was gone. She opened her eyes, breathing again. It was as if a threshold had been passed. Something had been . . . decided. Casting cautiously around her mental processes, she found everything in order. The dreams had released her. Just to be sure, she glanced around the gray and black metallic interior of the spacecraft, then again at the computer image of grasses rippling in the wind—nope, no uncontrollable longing. Everything fine here.

With a shake of her head, Cass turned from her computer to look at the monitors scanning the planet now. All they showed was gray. Frowning, she began to question the monitor malfunction when the silence of the two men informed her that the monitors were showing exactly what was there—miles and miles of lifeless gray dust.

"There has been an error," Cass mused, turning back to the computer screen bursting with green. "There is some mistake. This is not BV eight oh six."

The Captain checked his bearings. "Yes, it is, Cass. Perhaps your information is in error."

She searched her data logs again. "No, my information is on BV eight oh six. The data is less than two hundred solar years old. Such a discrepancy can't be due to time alone. . . ." She trailed off, watching in perplexity as the monotonous gray zipped by.

Suddenly there was a blip on the monitors. "Wait! There's something!" Cass cried. Wilsey glanced disparagingly at her. She herself was at a loss to explain her urgency. But the Captain obligingly returned to the blip, and they saw rolling slopes of blue-green. Cass released her breath in relief. This was what they were supposed to see.

The monitors showed them three different views: one of the grass-covered hills, one of a curiously swaying forest, and one of a grouping of marblelike, domed buildings—the first clue to the present inhabitants of this planet.

The crew watched the monitors as Captain Enders manually guided the craft to hover above the city. "Engaging computer scan," he droned. The information the computer gathered was then automatically relayed to their home base, Earth Station 16. Then he sat back to peer up into the monitor over his head. Tapping a switch, he said, "Verbal analysis."

A precise metallic voice responded, "The habitable portion of the planet comprises eleven scattered regions with a total area of approximately one thousand six hundred seventy-two square kilometers. The remainder surface area is composed of sterile mineral components."

This information stunned Cass so that she missed part of the computer's continued analysis: "The structures in view are artificially cut and heat-welded, composed of calcite with other mineral traces. They are inhabited by humans. The area of this habitable region is approximately forty-one square kilometers."

Cass stared at the beautiful buildings. With such a small area to live in, the people must have taken great care in making their shelters. Seemingly too light and delicate to be stone, they were arranged in a pattern that suggested a blossom. Circling them were symmetrical fields bordered by paved walks. A large pond lay just beyond the eastern edge of the city. From above, the visual effect of these combined elements was striking.

"Descending to four hundred eighty kilometers," Wilsey yawned. This brought them down for their first view of the people.

Three persons of unknown gender stood conversing in front of a domed building. They had long, bright-colored hair, and were dressed in a silvery, stretchy fabric that draped over their shoulders like robes yet extended down to their ankles like pants. The people could have been female, but something about them made Cass reserve judgment till she saw more. Still, they, like their city, exuded a refined, pleasing attitude.

The group broke apart slightly to address another person passing, who in comparison appeared definitely female. The others, Cass decided, were male.

As she watched the woman converse with her companions, Cass unconsciously fingered the dark blue flight suit she wore. The woman's clothes were of a similar fabric as the men's, but the pants were banded at the hips and fuller through the legs. Her long hair was puffed out from her head and colored a vivid pink. After the initial shock, Cass rather like the look. It made her look like a flower, or a bird, and it fit with the city quite well.

Nauseous, Cass turned briefly away from the monitor. She tensed, hand on her stomach, wondering if the emotional attack was about to return. But no—her emotions were steady. What she was feeling was physical. She was simply growing space-weary, she reasoned. Tired of traveling. She sucked in her gut to drive the nausea away.

But it persisted. Distressed, Cass glanced up at the monitor to see a close-up of the woman's simpering face. Then Cass realized her seasickness was caused by a sudden application of gravity. "Wilsey! How can we see that woman so close? What's our altitude?"

The engineer looked over his equipment bemusedly, but retained a pitch of sarcasm in saying, "Calm down. We've dropped to a hundred sixty kilometers."

"Well, take us back up to four-eighty," the Captain instructed. Wilsey throttled up, but Cass felt the pull of gravity even stronger in the pit of her stomach. Wilsey tried a few other maneuvers which were unsuccessful, then Captain Enders pressed a small plate marked MOR-on (for Manual Override, voice on). "Moron, why are we losing altitude?"

The metallic voice answered, "You are throttling down, sir."

"No, Moron. I instruct you to throttle up."

"I cannot override your manual command, sir."

"Your reading of the manual command is in error. Disregard the manual command!" Enders said, irritated.

"To return to computer-assisted drive, please follow the procedure outlined in section 248c, paragraph 13 of the—"

The Captain swore and pounded off the voice mode. Cass asked, "Could the strong magnetic field be throwing the readings off?"

"Maybe," the Captain grunted. "We don't have time to make adjustments before we hit the ground. Wilsey, get us away from this population—find a remote spot in that desert for us to land."

"Aye, sir." Wilsey glanced in the monitor as they skimmed away from the city while descending rapidly. "We may not make the desert. But looks like we're coming up on a golf course right here." He was referring to a silky stretch of green ringed by trees. Shutting off the computer guidance system, Enders took the controls, and they strapped their emergency belts.

In the scant seconds before they landed, Cass felt a quiver that something was wrong. This stretch was too green . . . the grass too short. . . . The craft hovered while the Captain lowered its legs, then they set down. Immediately an alarm went off: "Attention! Flotation required!" A flashing light indicated the craft's emergency buoys had been inflated.

"What the—?" muttered Wilsey. The monitors could not show them what they had landed in, so the Captain unstrapped himself to open the hatch. They looked out to see the ship settling in a thick green slime. In spite of the buoys, they were being sucked down.

"It's some kind of quicksand!" Enders exclaimed.

"Your readings should have shown that!" Cass said accusingly to Wilsey.

"Don't blame this on me!" he spat. They watched the slime ooze up the hull. Captain Enders dropped back in his seat and threw the engines wide open. Fiercely whining, they managed to pull the ship up and scoot it almost to the edge of the basin, where trees grew in solid ground. Then, choked by scum seeping in through unseen cracks, the engines shut down entirely and the ship began to settle again.

Enders stood to open an overhead compartment and remove a broad-barreled gun. From this he fired a grappling hook trailing cable into the nearby trees. The hook caught and held less than four meters from the craft. While he was doing this, Wilsey had retrieved an emergency pack from under his seat. Cass stood back out of the way while Wilsey handed the pack off to the Captain, who leaned out to throw it to solid ground among the trees. As slime began to seep through the open hatch, Enders waded out, traversing hand-over-hand on the cable. Wilsey followed close behind him.

By the time Cass got onto the rope, the scum had entered the ship up to her knees and accelerated its sinking. She found herself almost swimming as she clung to the slippery cable. While regular calisthenics was a requirement of exploration, it fell far short of enabling her to exert the kind of effort needed now.

"Wilsey—Captain—" she gasped, struggling to move one hand over the other without losing her grip. The downward suction was terrific. "I don't think I can make it . . . Wilsey—" She glimpsed him scrambling up the edge of the basin as the slime crept up to her neck.

She kept calm enough not to kick and struggle, but no strength she possessed was adequate to counter the tremendous pull. Slowly, as she stubbornly grasped the line, the cool mud covered her face and closed over her head. It made her think, strangely, of the last time she'd gotten a facial, and joked about being entombed in mud. I wanted an honest death? This is a real death in real mud, she thought.

Cass held her breath instinctively, reaching up as if to get air through her fingers. Within seconds her shallow lung capacity had reached its limit, and her muscles began quivering. Still, she resisted panic to keep hold on that cable. Surely Wilsey or Enders would pull her up. Surely they must. Her lungs began to burn, and the urge to suck in whatever medium encompassed her became crushing. Help, she pleaded silently. Help me. . . .

Then she felt tension on the line. It began to slip through her grasp. With a last surge of will she tightened her fingers to hold on until she felt a hand grab her arm to pull her up. But then the breathing reflex overcame her, and she opened her mouth to whatever was there. As she did, her face broke the surface and she took in a moderate amount of slime.

She wheezed, gagged and coughed; fingers dug the slime from her mouth and she breathed again—sobbing, sneezing, and coughing. She grasped her rescuer's arms. "Thank you, Wilsey . . . Captain. . . ." Blinking through the mud, she gazed into the lucid blue eyes of an alien.

Cass gaped at him. Her first impression was of a great lumpy beast with a manlike face and hair like warm brown wool. A spate of coughing struck her momentarily, and the creature reached out a hand to pat her—hard—on the back.

Disoriented, she looked around for her shipmates, who were not to be seen. Then she jerked back to look for the spacecraft. There was only a slight indention on the surface of the quagmire where it had been. Soon, even that disappeared.

"Oh, no," she moaned. "Oh, no, no. How will I get out of here now?"

The alien beside her cocked his head and spoke, pointing toward the sunken craft. She paused to listen in despair, trying to remember the computer phonics. He repeated his statement, slower, but she could not match sounds with meanings. Cradling her head, she choked back frustrated tears.

The creature stood up to begin carrying her like a baby. Surprised, she saw that upright he was indeed shaped like a man—the lumps he had when crouched were his knees. And what she had assumed to be body bulk were the animal skins he wore. Now he looked merely wild instead of alien.

He carried her away from the basin until she struggled. "No—please—I'm fine. Put me down." Although she knew he could not understand the words, he immediately complied, carefully lowering her feet to the ground.

Then he wiped mud off himself with such a rueful expression that she laughed. He startled at the sound. Understanding it, he gestured emphatically at her torso. She looked down to see that her dark blue suit made a nice foil for great patches of drying green scum. "Oh, ick."

He took a few steps and scooped up a bundle that had evidently been dropped in haste. As he paced away, she uncertainly stood where she was. Then he turned expectantly, waiting for her to follow.

Cass mechanically picked up her feet to walk with him. After extended sweeps in the confines of the spacecraft, her muscles were badly atrophied. She was barely able to keep up with him, even at his slow pace. Yet—it felt good. It felt strangely good to feel the blood flowing again. For a little while she just watched her feet move one in front of the other, and it seemed a miracle. Once she knew she could walk, she looked around to see where they were going.

The quagmire was in a depression at the foot of some gentle, forested hills, which they now began climbing. The grass beneath her feet changed from weedy, coarse stuff to something rather finer, and Cass stared down at it. This was the same grass she had seen on the monitor, but in real life, it looked much different. There was an iridescent quality about it which wavered between greenish and bluish hues, depending on how the light struck it.

Absorbed in studying the grass, Cass stumbled against a tree and felt it give ever so slightly. She jerked her head up in puzzlement. The trunk was covered with a smooth, deep brown bark that looked almost like skin. Long, limber branches arched down to the ground, sporting tiny little leaves that flitted in the lightest breeze. A branch nearby seemed to move of its own toward her, and Cass sprang away from it. The alien observed all this with a distinct expression of amusement.

It was afternoon now, in this part of the world. The large orange sun seemed to sprawl across the sky. Seeing the direction of its descent, Cassandra assigned that direction west, as on Earth. It gave her a sense of competence to get her bearings under this strange sun. Only with a push of the imagination could Cass recall that this was the star Pollux, whose orbiting planets she had been so casually observing. She and her shipmates. At this moment she wondered very strongly what had become of them.

Glancing down, she paused midstride, one foot poised in the air. She was not believing what she was seeing: as if in anticipation of her footfall, the grass at her feet had parted so as not to be crushed. She lifted her foot and the grass straightened, but parted behind her as she set the foot down for balance. She lifted the foot again and the grass fell back into its natural position. It was all so quick and synchronized, she had missed it entirely at first.

Cass stared at the alien, who was patiently watching her child-like experiments. "Did you see that?" she exclaimed in English. He chuckled.

She almost fell down. Here, in the company of an alien totally unknown to her on a strange planet where the grass moved on its own, she recognized his chuckle, as he had recognized her laugh. Was laughter universal?

She must have looked weak, for he put a supportive hand under her elbow. They came out of the trees and trod through a meadow of bending grass while Cass gazed at the landscapes she had only glimpsed through the monitor. The meadow seemed as vast as an ocean. The trees stretched up like giants behind her, leaning to whisper to each other when the humans had passed. Everywhere Cass felt the—the detail of this place, and she considered how deceptive the narrow little view on the monitor had been.

While trying to absorb the shock of her new surroundings, Cass also studied the man strolling by her side. He was almost as tall as Captain Enders, and wore a sleeveless skin vest and calf-length pants. He was barefoot, and walked as if he had always been barefoot. (The discomfort of slime in her boots made Cass wish she were barefoot, as well.) His arms were long and strong; his skin a golden brown from long hours under Pollux's steady gaze. His face was—mostly to the ground. He seemed to know he was being scrutinized, so he seldom looked up.

Soon he did raise his face to point ahead, where Cass saw a crude shelter protruding from the base of a small hill. How sweet. He's taking me home, she thought, when suddenly she realized that, indeed, this was his home. She was the alien here, not he, and now that she was known, she felt imperiled. Who knew how the population might react to extraterrestrial visitors?

Although thoroughly alarmed by now, Cass knew it was pointless to try to run anywhere. They approached the shelter, which looked to her something like an igloo made of smooth bark. Her host pressed an obscure panel and a door silently raised.

Cass curiously studied the framing. The door opened as if mechanically operated, which seemed inconsistent with the level of this society's technology—or what she knew of it. A lot could happen in two hundred years.

Once they were inside, he pressed another panel to close the door, and Cass saw no springs or pulleys. Her face must have conveyed her puzzlement, for he explained the door with one word. She shook her head in frustration, and he turned away as if satisfied that she understood.

"No." She caught at his furry vest and found his word for "tell" or "say."

"Tsiguhl," he said slowly. "Tsiguhl."

The phonics suddenly registered and the meaning of the word came to her. "Magnets! That you with magnets?" The words were his language, if not the syntax. He shook his head in answer and she paused, confused. Heedless, he dropped his bundle by the doorway and called out a name.

Cass turned, taking note of the interior of the shelter. Her immediate impression was of warmth, and comfort. The floor was covered with animal-skin rugs. Slits in the ceiling and walls allowed ventilation, and had panels which pulled down to close them off. There was a fireplace carved in the hillside that the shelter rested against, and next to it, what looked like the entrance to a tunnel.

Near it, she noticed an indention in the rock that contained a number of small objects all lined up. As her host called the name a second time, Cass wandered to this niche and picked up one object. It fell open in her hands.

"A book!" she exclaimed in whispered English. The discovery should not have surprised her, considering the age of this population. But a library like this seemed incongruous in a hut. It made her wonder what storehouses of knowledge she would find in the city. It's been a long time since I held data in my hands, she considered, fingering the tooled cover.

Then from out of the tunnel appeared a man, evidently in response to her host's summons. He stared at her in as much astonishment as she stared at him. His hair was short and a natural gray, as the other's was short and uncolored. He was smaller and older than the other, and his back was unnaturally bowed. To be certain of the deformity, she glanced at the first, whose back was broad and straight.

The little man did not miss her comparative glance by any means. His mouth twisted down in a scowl and he stalked back into the tunnel. Calling again, with that chuckle in his voice, her host leaned into the dark entrance, beckoning her to come.

Cass stiffened, not liking the forbidding hole into which the troll had disappeared. At her resistance, her friend softly urged, "Come. Don't be afraid."

She was startled to discern every word, then reasoned that the phonics were simply returning after being chased away by fear. Finding that she still clutched the book, she replaced it in the niche before hesitantly following him into the tunnel.

It was indeed dark, but not endless; she saw a glow at the other end about eight meters away. Passing cool, damp earth, Cass peered ahead at the widening glow until they emerged into a crystalline wonderland—a lighted cavern with a free-falling waterfall feeding a pond and flowing out in a gurgling underground stream.

Thin sheets of delicate, striated rock cascaded down a wall of the cave to end in rippled candy folds. Pink spiral crystals wound up to a pinhole of light in the ceiling, the whole of which glittered like a starry night sky. Massive natural columns and partial columns stood like sentries around a great hall. The beauty of it all overwhelmed Cass, who sat weakly on a convenient rock.

Gaping at the palatial splendor, she suddenly apprehended, "Why—you're—you're a cave man!" She leaned on her knees and laughed hysterically at the incongruity of it.

He smiled sympathetically at her strained laughter, but his hunchbacked friend eyed her in disdain. Her host patted her shoulder to quiet her, then pointed to his friend and said, "Ryal." He pointed to himself, saying, "Nex." Then he extended his hand toward her and waited.

Calmed by a classic introduction, Cass put her hand to her chest and said, "Cassandra." Why she gave her full name was a mystery; it just seemed to fit the situation better.

"Cassandra," Nex repeated politely, shaking his head. It was just beginning to occur to her that a headshake did not mean what she thought it meant when Nex quietly told Ryal, "Take care of him." (That is an approximate translation of what she heard, as she knew enough of the language to understand some of it but not speak it much. The fact that her host had not yet discerned her gender upset her unreasonably.) Then Nex breezed out of the cave as if he had something else to do.

Not much caring for her new host, Cassandra gave him a cautionary glance. Ryal returned it with feeling and pointed to the pond. "Wash," he ordered.

She crouched with dignity and leaned over the glassy water, then gasped at her reflection. Her face was covered with ugly green splotches, and her long hair was so thickly matted with the stuff that she looked like some green Medusa. "No wonder you ran when you saw me," she muttered, splashing water on her face.

Ryal leaned over her in dissatisfaction. "Wash," he insisted.

Cassandra looked up. "I am," she countered in English, without attempting to find his words for it.

She was bending farther over the pool to wet her hair when Ryal pushed her in with that one-word directive: "Wash!"

Sputtering, she broke the surface and grasped the edge of the pond to hoist herself out. Ryal doggedly pushed her back in. "Stop there!" she screamed, attempting to communicate in his words.

"Wash!" he commanded.

"You—oh, you—" She gagged on water. Actually, it wasn't such a bad idea, as her flight suit—a one-piece body suit with a hydrotic, carbon-treated lining—was caked inside and out with green scum. The boots came off first, and Cassandra tossed them up on the edge. Ryal merely watched. She felt relieved to peel her suit off, hanging on the edge with one hand as he loomed over her sternly. She took a moment to rinse scum off it before shoving it up on the edge with the boots. At once Ryal snatched up suit and boots and departed the cave with them.

"Ryal, hold!" she pleaded, anxious over the possibility of Nex's return. Peering toward the tunnel, she hung on the rock edge, but saw nothing of either of them. So Cassandra just soaked, rinsing mud from her hair while waiting for someone to bring her some clothes.

The water was pleasantly warm, which probably accounted for the comfortable temperature of the cavern. Whatever the weather was like outside, the temperature here probably never varied more than a few degrees. "Natural climate control," she mused, not objecting to a good bath at all.

Ryal returned first, carrying an armload of furs. He dropped them beside the pool and gestured. "Out." Cassandra self-consciously pulled herself up on the edge while he held out a skin robe with two armholes.

As she slid into the fur, he remarked, "Oh. You are female." Coloring, she took the leather sash he held out, to tie the robe closed. Then he pushed down on her shoulder to make her sit so he could tie two skin pieces around her feet, like custom-fitted boots.

Holding one of her feet, he grunted, "He was right—you need something on your feet. Don't walk much, do you? Flabby." He said all this as if he expected her not to understand a word. His manner was gruff, but she understood by now that he was harmless.

Once dressed (comfortably, at that), she demanded in English, "Where are my clothes? My flight suit?" She gestured up and down her body.

Ryal's thin lips closed in a smug smile. "You wait here." He pointed to the skin rug beneath her. With the premonition that she would not see her flight suit again, she watched him leave. At least, she thought, he can tell Nex I'm not a man.

Cassandra ran her fingers through her tangled hair as she glanced around the cave. Her eye fell on one of the light boxes that hung on the cavern wall about six feet up. Curious, she got up to study it. The light was steady, emitting no smoke or odor. The box itself was cool to the touch.

She was lifting the bottom edge to look for wires, tubes or batteries when the whole thing came off in her hands. It had simply been hung on the wall by a hook, and was all over the same. Everything else being ruled out, it must be a chemical like luciferin. She dare not tamper with it further until she knew what it was.

Musing over such a sophisticated lighting device, Cassandra hung the light box on the wall where it had been. Like the magnets that opened the door, it seemed out of place in a hut with animal skins. The city they had seen in the monitors was the place for these amenities. So why were these two men living in a cave instead of the city? Her data had given no clue about such hermits. It occurred to her that she might better find out why they chose to live here. If there was a conflict, she had better know about it. Sighing, she shook her head. Too many mysteries. Too many unknowns to deal with when her first concern was survival.

At that point Ryal reentered with a bowl in his hands. From any angle, the hump on his back looked prominent and painful no matter how he tried to minimize it. Cassandra resolved not to stare.

Ryal gestured to the skins. "Sit!" She did so, vaguely wishing he would not order her around like a pet. He handed her the bowl, which had a curiously shaped rim. Cassandra sniffed at the creamy white liquid it held. Belatedly, she realized that if he was going to be her caretaker, she might better make friends with him. He motioned for her to drink, so she put her mouth to the indention in the rim and tilted back her head.

Prompting the creamy soup out of the bowl was not easy. When a little did come, the rest followed on either side of her mouth. Cassandra jerked up and wiped her mouth sheepishly.

Ryal's thin lips twisted into a quirky little smile, so she smiled in response. "I look grumpy?" she asked in his language.

He startled, then his expression darkened. "Where are you from?"

With great difficulty, Cassandra began to describe the spaceship, but be waved that off. "Yes, you came from another world. Which one?"

"Moons ago, Earth," she answered. There was no way she could explain a space station.

He nodded, but his expression was confused. Then Cassandra heard Nex's voice: "Is this yours?"

She turned to see him at the tunnel entrance, holding out a soiled instrument. He approached with the object extended, and she took it in bewilderment, wiping it clean of a brown, sticky substance. It was the temperature probe that was part of the ship's emergency landing equipment. It had a long, pointed end, the last six inches of which had been soiled. "Yes," she answered. "It came with box. Where be it?"

Nex took the probe impassively. "It was used to kill a man from Alons." Ryal's head snapped toward her.

Cassandra felt suddenly faint. "Oh, no. Wilsey," she murmured, sinking to the furs at her feet.

Nex sat on the furs. "Cassandra, how many came with you?"

"Two." She held up two fingers.

"They were not lost in the bog, were they?"

"No. They go to ground in face of me," she answered, and pantomimed passing hand over hand on the cable.

Nex paused at the conclusion he had reached, but Ryal did not hesitate to hiss, "One of your companions killed him!"

"It certainly looks that way," she said miserably (in English).

"I cannot hide this. I must make it known to the Council," Nex said, and she believed that his reluctance was real.

"Yes," she faintly agreed. "Nex—I be—I be—" In her distress, she could not find the word for sorry.

He cocked his head at her, then gave the probe to Ryal. "Go tell them everything." Ryal took it and loped out.


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© 2008 Robin Hardy



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